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It is often believed that the type of religion that a group of people follow (Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, etc.) can account for significant and important cultural differences, with implications for business ethics, corporate and social responsibility, and other business-related variables. The alternative view is that the cultural differences between religions are either trivial or are actually misinterpreted ethnic or national differences. The purpose of this paper is to compare and evaluate these two views.

The authors focus on Africa, the most religious region of the world, whose cultures should therefore be especially susceptible to the effect of religion. We used latest data from 100 religious groups, following 19 religions, and living in 27 countries, from the nationally representative Afrobarometer. The items in the authors’ analysis reveal cultural ideologies concerning key cultural domains, such as inclusive–exclusive society (gender equality, homophobia and xenophobia), the role of government and the role of religion in politics. These domains are related to cultural conservatism versus modernization and have clear implications for management. The authors compare the group-level effect of belonging to a certain nation to the effect of belonging to a certain religion.

A hierarchical cluster analysis produced crystal-clear national clusters, with only one of the 100 religious groups systematically clustering outside its respective national cluster. The authors did not obtain a single cross-national cluster of coreligionists. Variation between nations was far greater than between religious groups and the latter was most often statistically insignificant. A comparison of Muslims with other religions revealed that Muslims are not generally more conservative, although they do have a marginally greater tendency to be less gender egalitarian. The authors conclude that the African national environments have a much stronger impact on cultural differences than do religions. The effect of the latter, compared to the former, is negligibly small and often insignificant. Thus, they find no evidence that religions can produce a powerful discriminant effect on some of the most important elements of culture.

Non-Abrahamic religions are poorly represented in Africa. Therefore, we could not assess their effect on culture. Nevertheless, it seems that attempts to explain cultural differences in values and ideologies in terms of religious differences are misguided, even in a cultural environment where religion is very strong.

The findings could help improve executive training in cross-cultural awareness, purging it from erroneous views on the origins of cultural differences. Managers should avoid simplistic explanations of the values and ideologies of their employees in terms of their religious affiliation.

Simplistic (yet very popular) explanations of culture as a function of type of religion should be avoided in society at large, too. The idea that different religions generate different cultures is not only dubious from a scientific perspective but also socially dangerous as it may lead to religious intolerance.

This is only the second study in the history of the whole cross-cultural field that provides a multinational and multidenominational comparison of the effect of nations versus religious denominations on culture.

1. Religions are often portrayed as sources of important cultural differences.

2. We compared differences in cultural modernization between religions and between nations in Africa.

3. Variation between 27 African countries dwarfed that between 100 religious groups.

4. Practically all religious groups yielded perfectly homogeneous national clusters.

5. We did not observe a single cluster of coreligionists from different countries.

6. We conclude that nations have a strong effect on cultural differences whereas religions have a minimal effect at best.

Religions are often portrayed as sources of important cultural differences.

We compared differences in cultural modernization between religions and between nations in Africa.

Variation between 27 African countries dwarfed that between 100 religious groups.

Practically all religious groups yielded perfectly homogeneous national clusters.

We did not observe a single cluster of coreligionists from different countries.

We conclude that nations have a strong effect on cultural differences whereas religions have a minimal effect at best.

This study aims to explore how a postmodern tribe enacts and re-interprets ideologies as a part of consumers’ collective experience, to enhance our understanding of consumer communities in conjunction with ideological capacities.

The community of “presenteers” is conceptualized as a self-organized tribe with heterogeneous components that generate capacities to act. Netnographic observation was conducted on 18 presenteer accounts and lasted around six months. Real-time data were collected by taking screenshots of the posts and stories that these users created and publicly shared. Data were analysed by adopting assemblage theory, combining inductive and deductive approaches. Firstly, a qualitative visual-textual content analysis of the tribe’s defining components was conducted. Then, the process continued with the thematic analysis of the ideological underpinnings of the tribe’s enactments.

Findings shed light on the ways in which consumer communities interpret the entanglement of religious, political, and cultural ideologies in shaping their experiences. In the case of the presenteers tribe, findings reflect a novel ideological interplay between neo-Ottomanism, post-feminism and consumerism.

The study offers a deep dive into a unique tribe that is being organized around the consumer-created practice of “presenteering” and investigates consumer communalization in alignment with the ideological turn in culture-oriented interpretative research on consumers, consumption, and markets. This exploration helps to bridge the research on the communalization of consumers with the recent discussions of ideology in the postmodern market.

The study offers a deep dive into a unique tribe that is being organized around the consumer-created practice of “presenteering” and investigates consumer communalization in alignment with the ideological turn in culture-oriented interpretative research on consumers, consumption, and markets. This exploration helps to bridge the research on the communalization of consumers with the recent discussions of ideology in the postmodern market.

The purpose of this study is to present a theoretical framework to demythologize Asian consumers' cultural and ideological narratives in relation to the newly emerging popular culture developed in Korea, widely known as “Korean wave.” In addition, methodological considerations for the understudied consumption phenomenon are also discussed.

From the extant literature on popular culture and globalization, a theoretical overview of Korean popular culture (KPC) is provided. Subsequently, a condensed presentation of netnography employing critical discourse analysis (CDA) is provided.

A netnography fused with CDA suggests a reflexive process in which a range of sociocultural tensions in the globalization process of KPC dynamically hybridize and transform into new cultural tastes in respective cultures.

Cultural branding can be revisited, as the new discourse generated in Asia envisions new entries into the global brandscape. Moreover, this endeavor helps explicate how a globalized trend is replaced with another through a paradoxical discursive process.

As this article discusses popular culture as a product to be consumed just as are other tangible products, it assists researchers in visualizing and theorizing about the globalization process of incorporeal, cultural products. The application of discursively enriched netnography facilitates pertinent analysis and ultimately theory‐building.

The purpose of this paper is to bring international marketing and consumer research attention to multicultural marketplaces as a new focal research lens. It develops a conceptualisation of multicultural marketplaces, demonstrating why they constitute new conceptual territory, before specifying five key areas for research development.

The paper draws from seminal international marketing literature and other fields to propose perspective shifts, and suggest theories and frameworks of potential usefulness to the five research areas.

The paper conceptualises multicultural marketplaces as place-centred environments (physical or virtual) where the marketers, consumers, brands, ideologies and institutions of multiple cultures converge at one point of concurrent interaction, while also being potentially connected to multiple cultures in other localities. Five key areas for research development are specified, each with a different conceptual focus: increasing complexity of cultural identities (identity), differentiation of national political contexts (national integration policies), intergroup conviviality practices and conflictual relationships (intergroup relations), interconnectedness of transnational networks (networks), and cultural dynamics requiring multicultural adaptiveness (competences).

For each research area, a number of research avenues and theories and frameworks of potential interest are proposed.

The paper demonstrates why multicultural marketplaces constitute new conceptual territory for international marketing and consumer research; it provides a conceptualisation of these marketplaces and a comprehensive research agenda.

Approaches to the sociology of culture have largely been constituted around the long tradition of functionalism in sociology. This has hampered the field greatly. Among other shortcomings, this intellectual foundation has led to a limited understanding of ideology and civil society, a conservative political orientation and an overdeterministic view of social action and the actor. In this paper, I explore and then apply a new approach to the sociology of culture, one that attempts to conceptualize more robustly the dynamics of ideology, ideological conflict and civil society. As part of this project, I endeavor to map out a critical cultural perspective that establishes a multidimensional understanding of the contingency of social action.

As the shortage in the information technology (IT) workforce continues, it is becoming increasingly important to understand the cultural dimensions of IT occupations that attract or drive away potential IT professionals. In the present study, the authors take an occupational culture approach to study the cultural fit of newcomers to IT occupations and to understand how young people perceive the culture embedded in this occupational community as they become part of it.

The authors take a sequential mixed methodology approach composed of two phases, one qualitative and the other quantitative. In the first phase of the study, nine focus groups and 27 interviews with college students were conducted to learn about the challenges and barriers that they personally experienced while becoming part of the IT occupational community. The second phase used results from the first qualitative phase to design a survey instrument that was administered to 215 IT college students who were currently or had recently been involved in IT work experience to evaluate their cultural fit to the IT occupational culture (ITOC) and its influence on their occupational commitment.

The results suggest that women, ethnic minorities and those with less work experience encountered greater difficulty fitting into different dimensions of ITOC. The results also showed that cultural fit is a good predictor of occupational commitment and affective commitment in particular.

An initial survey instrument was developed to measure cultural fit to ITOC. This instrument can be further modified and adapted to be used in the hiring process by HR departments to measure cultural fit to organizational subcultures, such as the one in the IT occupational group.

This paper constitutes an important contribution to the rigor and development of the theory and research of human resources in information technologies.

The emerging synthesis between nonviolent action and contentious politics studies has yielded important insights. Yet it also reproduces the dichotomy between politics and culture that continues to haunt both fields. Extending recent work by Jean-Pierre Reed and John Foran, our contribution introduces the political cultures of nonviolent opposition concept to forge a new synthesis, one that recognizes the politics of nonviolent culture and the culture of nonviolent politics. We apply our theoretical framework to two empirical cases, the Indian independence movement and the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil (known as Movimento Sem Terra or MST), and conclude with ideas for further research on political cultures of nonviolent opposition.

The consumer acculturation literature argues that reconstituting familiar embodied practices from the culture of origin leads to a comforting sense of home for consumers who move from one cultural context to another. This paper aims to extend this thesis by examining further dimensions in migrant consumers’ experiences of home culture consumption.

This paper analyses data gathered through multi-modal depth interviews with Southeast Asian skilled migrants in New Zealand through the conceptual lens of embodiment.

Building on Dion et al.’s (2011) framework of ethnic embodiment, the analysis uncovers home culture consumption as multi-layered experiences of anchoring, de-stabilisation and estrangement, characterised by convergence and divergence between the embodied dimensions of being-in-the-world, being-in-the-world with others and remembering being-in-the-world.

This paper underscores home culture consumption in migration as an ambivalent embodied experience. Further research should investigate how other types of acculturating consumers experience and negotiate the changing meanings of home.

Marketers in migrant-receiving and migrant-sending cultural contexts should be sensitised to disjunctures in migrants’ embodied experience of consuming home and their role in heightening or mitigating these disjunctures.

This paper helps contribute to consumer acculturation theory in two ways. First, the authors show how migrants experience not only comfort and connection but also displacement, in practices of home culture consumption. Second, the authors show how migrant communities do not only encourage cultural maintenance and gatekeeping but also contribute to cultural identity de-stabilisation.

The aim of this chapter is to examine and problematize the taken-for-granted conceptual understanding of risk practices in sport cultures. By inspecting the mainstay, and one might argue relatively stagnant, constructions of risk in the sociological study of sport, a case for attending to a wider range of risk-based ideologies and cultural practices is presented. The chapter ventures away from viewing risk as predominantly physical in sport settings and constructing athletes as oppressed agents who naively acquiesce to practices of self-injury and self-alienation in sport cultures. Emphasis is given to a broad spectrum of risks undertaken in the practice of sport, and the reflexive, personal nature by which risk may be understood by sports and physical culture participants.

In the first part of the chapter, the relatively simplistic or unidimensional construction of risk in sociological research in sport is reviewed. In the second part, the complexity of the concept of risk is then discussed alongside case examples that push the analytical boundaries of how risk is a multidimensional construct of athletes’ minds, bodies, selves, beliefs, values, and identities in a host of relational contexts.

Risk is best understood as a set of practices and belief that exists on a continuum in sport and physical cultures. Risk-taking in sport, however, can be personally injurious and detrimental along a number of lines but is also often calculated, personally/group satisfying and existentially rewarding at times. If the concept of risk is to be applied and interrogated in sport and physical cultures, it should be done so, therefore, in radically contextual manners.

This chapter illustrates the need for new and exploratory theoretical understandings of what risk means to athletes and other participants in sport and physical culture. New substantive topics are proposed, as are methodological suggestions for representations of the unfolding risk in the process of “doing” sport.