Search results

This paper aims to offer insight into how strategies within the accounting profession, which has been becoming more global, might be changed by the recent outbreak of the Second Cold War between the West and the Rest of the World.

We explore the strategies of those who called themselves “Confucian accountants” in China, a country which has recently discouraged its state-owned enterprises from using the services of the Big 4. We do this by employing qualitative research methods, including reflexive photo interviews, in which Big-4 accountants, recognised as the most Westernised accounting actors in China, and Confucian accountants are asked to take and explain photographs representing their professional lives. Bourdieu’s notions of “economy of practices” and “vision-of-division strategy” are drawn upon to understand who the Confucian accountants are and what they do strategically in their pursuit of a higher revenue stream and improved social standing in the Chinese social space.

The homegrown Confucian accountants share cultural-cognitive characteristics with neighbouring social actors, such as their clients and government officials, who have been inculcated with Confucianism and the state’s cultural confidence policy in pursuit of a “socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics”. Those accountants try to enhance their social standing and revenue stream by strategically demonstrating their difference from Big-4 accountants. For this purpose, they wear Confucian clothes, have Confucian props in their office, employ Confucian phrases in their everyday conversations, use Confucian business cards and construct and maintain guanxi with government officials and clients.

This paper is the first attempt to explore Confucian accountants’ strategies for increasing their revenue and social standing at the start of the Second Cold War.

Prior research examining cultural effects on customer service expectations has primarily used more generic Western cultural theory on an aggregate scale or with only a single variable to draw conclusions on a customer’s underlying reasoning for buying a service. This study aims to focus on culturally distinct clusters within non-Western nations, specifically exploring within-cluster differences in service expectations within the Confucian Asia cluster.

This study developed a measurement model of Chinese cultural values and service expectations, consisting of a three and five-factor structure, respectively. Data from a sample of 351 diners were analysed using SmartPLS software. The data was compared with similar studies within the Confucian Asia cluster to understand the culture effect on service expectations and within-cluster variations.

The findings underscore the varying importance of cultural values in shaping customer service expectations, emphasizing their relative, rather than equal, significance. The study provides insights into potential within-group differences in customer service expectations within the same cultural cluster – without losing sight of the fundamental cultural heterogeneity of the Confucian culture.

Managers should leverage the distinct cultural values of their operating country to gain insights into diverse customer groups, predict their behaviours and meet their needs and expectations.

This study offers valuable insights to both service management scholars and practitioners by focusing on culturally distinct clusters of non-Western nations and exploring their effects on variation in service expectations within these clusters.

Ethical leadership has been recognized as a critical factor in encouraging employees’ moral voices. This study offers a dual-route model to understand this process. The boundary conditions of these two routes are discussed herein.

The data originate from a multiwave, multisource survey study of 212 leader–subordinate dyads in Taiwan drawn from a variety of industry sectors.

The findings validate both the cognitive (moral efficacy) and affective (affective attachment) pathways from ethical leadership to moral voice, influenced by the organizational factor of political climate. While the moral efficacy pathway is more pronounced in a situation of weak political climate, the affective attachment pathway remains effective regardless of the climate’s strength.

Managers need to identify if their organization prioritizes rational professionalism or interpersonal affection. In the former case, they should focus on the learning effects of ethical leadership. Conversely, in the latter, the emphasis should be on the leader-subordinate relationship. Doing so optimizes the effectiveness of ethical leadership in growing moral voices.

Considering both cognitive and affective routes from ethical leadership to moral voice could integrate social learning theory (SLT) and social exchange theory (SET). Identifying factors influencing these two routes resonates with the leader–situation interaction perspective. This research deepens the understanding of ethical leadership's effects on encouraging and protecting employee moral voice.

This paper aims to explore the role of family members in human trafficking and how their roles impact and are perceived by their children and wards.

This paper uses data collected through a longitudinal, cross-country study. The study was conducted among 31 female, Nigerian victims of trafficking in Italy.

The authors argue that family members play important, howbeit diverse roles across space and time, in the different stages of the trafficking process, echoing a relational approach of their geographies.

This paper discusses the under-researched role of how family members may (wilfully or unknowingly) facilitate and aid the trafficking of their dependents and the consequences of their involvement on their children and wards.

For researchers and sector agencies around the world, poor academic integrity is seen as a significant risk to universities (Bretag & Harper, 2017; QAA, 2020; TEQSA, 2019). Given the existential threat that acts of academic misconduct are deemed to pose to higher education, interest in ways of developing academic integrity is correspondingly high and often invokes the concept of values (Macfarlane et al., 2014; Morris, 2018). However, to ascribe to academic integrity, the status of a self-evident, perhaps universal, value of contemporary higher education is contentious on many levels. This chapter takes in turn three of the most common ways in which students and scholars infringe on the principles of academic integrity – plagiarism, collusion, and contract cheating – and explores what the prohibiting of each of these acts reveals about the values of contemporary higher education. It argues that, far from neutral or universal, the values of academic integrity appear both normative and culturally specific, promoting a particular conception of higher education which risks excluding large sections of the global population. To counter this, the notion of threshold values – borrowing from Meyer and Land's (2005) notion of the “threshold concept” – is proposed, identifying the development of shared values as crucial to ensuring that contemporary, globalized universities are inclusive and accessible spaces.

This paper aims to introduce the concept of compassion to the field of international business studies. As international business activities continuously intensify and hence generate a work environment characterized by cultural heterogeneity and pluralism, the notion of compassion in a cross-cultural context can be regarded a key skill for employees in internationally operating firms to enable coping with potential cross-cultural conflicts.

In this narrative-oriented type of review, the authors discuss compassion in a cross-cultural context by drawing on the literature in the management and international business studies. By connecting prior research on compassion with the typical research interests in the IB domain, the authors identify and define potential future research foci for a research agenda centering on the role that cross-cultural compassion plays.

The authors argue that the conventional approach to learning about other national cultures, their value and norm systems, needs to be complemented by the acquisition of compassion skills. In todays culturally diverse business environment where employees increasingly work in virtual teams, cultural complexity is hardly manageable alone by developing expert knowledge about respective cultural contexts to prevent cross-cultural conflicts.

By drawing on extant research on compassion conducted in neighboring disciplines of the social sciences, the authors conceptualize compassion in the context of international business research. Because compassion in a cross-cultural context is new to international business research, this study suggests directions for future research consisting of four research streams to guide future research on compassion in a cross-cultural context in international business studies.

This study aims to theorize and empirically examine how guanxi in Chinese collectivistic culture affects entrepreneurs to leverage the structural holes they occupy when it comes to promoting knowledge transfer.

To examine the hypotheses, this study used a mixed-methods research approach where quantitative questionnaires and social network analyses were used through 365 Chinese entrepreneurs, and qualitative semistructured interviews were conducted through 50 Chinese entrepreneurs.

In a Chinese entrepreneur’s guanxi network, structural holes will impede knowledge transfer among network members, but guanxi will moderate this impeding effect.

By revealing how “structural hole controllers” become “structural hole fillers” under the moderating influence of guanxi in Chinese collectivistic culture, this study recognizes the different roles that persons who occupy a structural hole play in different situations, which advances structural hole theory. In addition, by exploring how entrepreneurs orchestrate these structural holes to create a strong guanxi network that can be infinitely extended, this study reveals a means to achieve both advantages of bonding and bridging social capital simultaneously, which generates a theoretical contribution to social capital integration.

This study suggests Chinese entrepreneurs to cultivate guanxi to improve their needs in decision-making by giving renqing, returning renqing, earning mianzi and giving mianzi.

By showing how Chinese entrepreneurs leverage their guanxi and structural holes to facilitate knowledge transfer, this study identifies the critical entrepreneurial behavior that promotes business development, thereby contributing to the literature of knowledge management, entrepreneurship and social network.

Any teaching topic can have sensitive content, or at least be complicated because lecturers and students are likely to hold (based on their own experiences, interests, and values) strong opinions. This chapter explores the theoretical and practical issues of teaching cultural concepts. Colleagues are often left to negotiate the teaching of sensitive issues with little guidance on which to base their approach and educational practices. Therefore using the framework ‘Teaching Sensitive Topics Using Social Positioning’ developed by the authors of this chapter, and illustrative example, the chapter explores the practice of teaching cultural concepts in the curriculum to identify themes related to what can be learned and disseminated. An analysis of international social work (SW) is drawn on to think critically about education and the cultural appropriateness of the theories, practices and competencies utilised. The authors draw on their own knowledge and experiences as registered SW’s/educators/academics/researchers, and their own teaching in relation to sensitive topics at local, national and international levels.

Our experiences, whilst based on teaching in other countries, highlight a range of considerations for all educators in teaching sensitive topics. There is a need to learn from these lessons when adopting cultural concept practices to develop curricula. We recommend adopting reflexivity, flexibility, openness, empathy, and emotional intelligence, which should allow colleagues to teach culturally sensitive subjects by forging transcultural understandings and critically applying these understandings to their own culture.