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The preservation and disappearance of indigenous people’s traditional knowledge system, under mainstream social culture immersion and fusion, have presented a dynamic and changing acculturation interactive relationship impacting Truku women’s health concepts. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to explore how the traditional Gaya knowledge system and mainstream culture confinement care model affect the beliefs and behaviours of postpartum self-care amongst contemporary Truku women.

An ethnographic semi-structured method, based on cultural care factors and the Leininger Sunrise Model, was conducted to interview 17 Truku women with childbearning experience in eastern Taiwan. As data were collected, UDIST Vivo 11.0 software was applied for analysis.

Amongst the three knowledge system categories, namely, traditional, mainstream and reconstruction, the traditional knowledge system, including Gaya norms, provides the overall cultural value of a Truku family. While taboo is inherited through the experience of the elders, the mainstream knowledge system favours the Han. However, the reconstruction knowledge system highlights the “functional” response strategies based on Truku women’s comfort and conveniences.

Limited relevant studies have focused on the health and postpartum self-care knowledge of ethnic Truku women in Taiwan. The results are expected to provide clinical medical personnel with a reference and strengthen cultural sensitivity and the ability to implement the cultural congruency care of postpartum indigenous women in Taiwan.

Student transitions from secondary to tertiary education have attracted global attention as universities and colleges of higher education seek to improve student retention. Over the course of one academic year, I documented the transitional experiences of first-year male Emirati students at a college of higher education in a rural location of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In this paper I describe four categories of cultural border crossing experiences – smooth, managed, difficult, and impossible – with easier and smoother crossing experiences associated with close congruency (related to the students’ self-perceived attitude and scholastic preparedness as broadly reflected in their competence in their second language, English) between the predominantly Arabic life-world associated with Emirati families and government schooling and the dominant Western/English language culture in institutes of higher education. Additionally, I describe and evaluate students’ cultural border crossing experiences with some Foundation program faculty, finding that those teachers who developed a classroom culture based on Kleinfeld’s (1975) notion of ‘warm demandingness’ and caring rapport-building appeared to have the most positive impact upon the students. Implications from this research have the potential to positively impact both the student and faculty classroom experience in the Gulf tertiary classroom, in addition to improving overall student retention rates.

Aims to examine the proposition that consumer sales promotions are more effective when they provide benefits that are congruent with those of the promoted product. This proposition is considered at the ethnic‐group level (i.e. do differences in cultural values at this level have an impact on sales promotion effectiveness?).

A quasi‐experimental design is used to test a series of hypotheses based on a sample of Anglo‐Australians and Chinese‐Australians. The main experiment is informed by the results of two pretests.

First, there are significant differences in consumer cultural values at an ethnic‐group level. Second, despite these differences, ethnicity does not have a significant impact on responses to sales promotions. Third, the expected congruency effects between products and promotion types are not found.

Some of the detailed results match those reported in previous studies, but there are important differences too.

There is a need to be aware of differing cultural values at an ethnic‐group level. Notwithstanding this inference, the second finding suggests that there continues to be scope for using standardised strategies when promoting to different ethnic groups. Finally, considerable caution should be exercised when planning promotion strategies around hoped‐for congruency effects.

New light is cast on the relationship between consumer differences at an ethnic‐group level and the effectiveness of various types of sales promotion for utilitarian and hedonic products.

The purpose of this study is to propose an alternative basis for calculating cultural distance scores using Schwartz's cultural values.

Cultural distance scores were calculated for 23 countries, based on the two most common measures of cultural difference (four cultural dimensions and Schwartz's 1994 culture level values), following Kogut and Singh's formula. Correlation analysis was used to assess the congruency between these two bases of cultural distance. In addition, their relationship with international trade figures was assessed, to understand how well each framework predicts the amount of trade between countries.

Inter‐country distances between 23 countries suggest that the two bases of cultural distance were not congruent. While the correlation between both cultural distance measures and international trade suggested a negative relationship, as expected, only cultural distance based on Schwartz's values was significantly related to international trade (p<0.05). It would appear that, at least in a trade context, Schwartz's values may play a more significant role than do Hofstede's dimensions.

To date, most cultural distance scores have been based on Hofstede's cultural dimensions. This paper provides the first analysis of cultural distance based on Schwartz's country level values. The paper shows that the two measures are not congruent and that, at least in the context of trade, cultural distance measures based on Schwartz's may be superior. Thus, researchers should carefully consider which cultural base is most appropriate for use in their study.

The purpose of this study is to provide insights and guidance for practitioners in terms of ensuring rigorous ethical and moral conduct in artificial intelligence (AI) hiring and implementation.

The research employed two experimental designs and one pilot study to investigate the ethical and moral implications of different levels of AI implementation in the hospitality industry, the intersection of self-congruency and ethical considerations when AI replaces human service providers and the impact of psychological distance associated with AI on individuals' ethical and moral considerations. These research methods included surveys and experimental manipulations to gather and analyze relevant data.

Findings provide valuable insights into the ethical and moral dimensions of AI implementation, the influence of self-congruency on ethical considerations and the role of psychological distance in individuals’ ethical evaluations. They contribute to the development of guidelines and practices for the responsible and ethical implementation of AI in various industries, including the hospitality sector.

The study highlights the importance of exercising rigorous ethical-moral AI hiring and implementation practices to ensure AI principles and enforcement operations in the restaurant industry. It provides practitioners with useful insights into how AI-robotization can improve ethical and moral standards.

The study contributes to the literature by providing insights into the ethical and moral implications of AI service robots in the hospitality industry. Additionally, the study explores the relationship between psychological distance and acceptance of AI-intervened service, which has not been extensively studied in the literature.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its related economic meltdown and social unrest severely challenged most countries, their societies, economies, organizations, and individual citizens. Focusing on both more and less successful country-specific initiatives to fight the pandemic and its multitude of related consequences, this chapter explores implications for leadership and effective action at the individual, organizational, and societal levels. As international management scholars and consultants, the authors document actions taken and their wide-ranging consequences in a diverse set of countries, including countries that have been more or less successful in fighting the pandemic, are geographically larger and smaller, are located in each region of the world, are economically advanced and economically developing, and that chose unique strategies versus strategies more similar to those of their neighbors. Cultural influences on leadership, strategy, and outcomes are described for 19 countries. Informed by a cross-cultural lens, the authors explore such urgent questions as: What is most important for leaders, scholars, and organizations to learn from critical, life-threatening, society-encompassing crises and grand challenges? How do leaders build and maintain trust? What types of communication are most effective at various stages of a crisis? How can we accelerate learning processes globally? How does cultural resilience emerge within rapidly changing environments of fear, shifting cultural norms, and profound challenges to core identity and meaning? This chapter invites readers and authors alike to learn from each other and to begin to discover novel and more successful approaches to tackling grand challenges. It is not definitive; we are all still learning.

Despite the long-term interest of medical sociologists in persons’ expectations of care, there is little known about older persons’ expectations of home care. Because satisfaction with home care is important to older persons, the construct of home-care satisfaction (H-CS) is an important concern of practitioners and researchers. Influenced by theories of expectations and satisfaction, researchers have characterized expectations of home care as pre-existing variables in relation to which persons appraise satisfaction. Although theorists have emphasized the importance of obtaining data about expectations when measuring satisfaction, there are few data about expectations of home care. This narrative review points out the gaps between the current research and related theories. The frameworks and methods of studies designed to measure HC-S are reviewed with particular attention to expectations. The need to add to the knowledge base about expectations (and thereby to increase the validity of the HC-S construct) is emphasized. Definitions and categories of expectations from various disciplines are presented as untapped realms for exploring expectancies and expectations in descriptive studies. An interface between the principle of individual differences and the parameter of personal importance of home-care issues is highlighted as a framework for descriptive research.

The primary objective of this paper is to investigate the attitudes, feelings and perceptions of Australian consumers towards service frontline employees with accents that differ from Standard Australian English, taking into consideration service‐country image and customer emotions.

This paper reports on a qualitative study designed to uncover the attitudes and perceptions of Australians towards service personnel with foreign accents.

The findings revealed that hearing a service provider with a foreign accent, particularly in services encounters without face‐to‐face contacts, often evokes a negative predisposition to certain accents, reduces the customers' level of tolerance and increases the perception of the service provider's lack of understanding. This negative stereotype bias seems to be moderated by the accent (a proxy of ethnicity) and service‐country image and influenced by customer emotions in the service interaction.

Future studies could also use a controlled experimental design where accent could be used as a sensory cue to further test the validity and reliability of the current findings while controlling for factors such as ethnic background, employment, education and age. Further research should also take service types and service outcomes into consideration in examining the effect of accents on customer service evaluation.

Accent as a service employee attribute influences customers' evaluation of the service encounter because of the stereotype customers have. Training in language skills, cross‐cultural interpersonal skills and authority to deviate from the script should be given to minimise the negative effect of service employee accent. Service firms also need to develop strategies to manage customer emotions and reactions.

This paper contributes to the service literature about service employee attributes and is particularly relevant to economies such as the USA, Canada, the UK, New Zealand and Australia where immigrants are a large part of the service workforce.

In view of the scarcity of studies on the relationship between national culture and total quality management (TQM), this paper examines the impact of Chinese cultural values on the total quality climate. Using a sample of 189 ISO 9000 certified companies in Taiwan, results from structural equation modeling indicate that Chinese cultural values do have a positive and statistically significant influence on these organizations’ quality climate. Given the results from a quantitative viewpoint, some congruencies among Chinese values and quality climate elements are suggested. Although using the case of Chinese culture, the theoretical proposition raised should gain generalizability in other national cultures towards a culturalist approach to the theorization of TQM.

This article aims to advance a new theoretical perspective on the basis of prosumption theory, namely, that online review platforms can be conceptualized as prosumer communities (and online reviews as prosumer-generated content). This perspective meshes with message tuning research to suggest specific mechanisms through which peer-to-peer prosumption takes place in online review communities. Overall, this article enriches and deepens theoretical understanding of prosumption behavior in the product review context and offers practical advice for inducing high-value, prosumer-generated content in online communities.

Exploratory observations of current practices across a wide spectrum of review platforms were conducted. The observed platforms include independent review sites (e.g. Yelp) and review sites affiliated with e-tailers (e.g. Amazon), general review sites (e.g. Viewpoints) and product-specific review sites (e.g. Healthgrades), large-scale review sites (e.g. TripAdvisor) and review sites of a smaller scale (e.g. Judy’s Book) and review sites based in different geographic regions, including Australia (e.g. Productreview.com.au), China (e.g. Taobao), Europe (e.g. Reevoo), India (e.g. Zomato) and North America (e.g. Foursquare).

Theoretical analysis suggests that high-quality review content is the result of collaborative prosumption characterized by three distinct value-adding processes: history-based message tuning, audience-based message tuning and norm-based message tuning. In-depth observations reveal that today’s review platforms are leveraging these value-adding processes to varying degrees. The overwhelming diversity of the observed platform features points to the need for more research on platform design and management.

This research identifies three distinct dimensions of review quality – novelty, relevancy and congruency – that can be systematically managed through platform design. The exploratory nature of this research necessitates follow-up work to further investigate how high-quality review content emerges in the historical, interpersonal and cultural contexts of online prosumer communities.

The prosumption-inducing mechanisms identified in this research have major consumer welfare and strategy implications. First, they may lead to novel, relevant and congruent consumer reviews. Second, they may enhance the value of brand communities (which rely heavily on collaborative prosumption).

This research addresses two intriguing questions pertinent to marketing theory and practice in the digital era. First, how do high-quality reviews emerge on product review platforms (which consist of ordinary consumers)? Second, what constitutes high-quality review content and how can platform managers facilitate the collaborative creation of high-quality review content by ordinary consumers?