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The purpose of this paper is to explore how translation activities influence knowledge transfer across cultures in Chinese multinational enterprises (MNEs). Although translation is recognized as a critical instrument for MNEs to enhance cross-national knowledge flow, scholars have not put much emphasis on the importance of translation in international business research.

This paper proposes a novel hierarchical framework to delineate the five major boundary-spanning functions regarding translation for knowledge transfer in China (i.e. exchanging, linking, manipulating, facilitating and intervening). Due to the paucity of relevant literature, the authors used exploratory case studies investigating two large Chinese MNEs to illustrate how individuals as boundary spanners handle the translation requirements associated with cross-cultural knowledge transmission within a MNE’s business network. The data coding approach was used to examine the assumed model.

The findings demonstrate that translators indeed play a vital role in cross-border knowledge exchanging, linking people with crucial knowledge, manipulating the flow of knowledge for protecting confidentiality, facilitating the cross-cultural interaction of various knowledge sources and intervening to prevent the occurrence of misunderstanding in MNE contexts. The authors also reveal how translators overcome the three constraints of language interpretation concerning knowledge transfer (i.e. lack of equivalence, cultural interference and ambiguity). The proposed research framework was fully supported.

The results provide insightful implications for MNEs to treat translation as a significant “re-codification” rather than a mundane task. Knowledge transfer within MNEs involves not only knowledge regarding products, technology and operations but also involves “whole organizations” including business models, organizational visions, missions and strategies.

The main value of this paper is to propose a novel model regarding the role of translation in cross-cultural knowledge transfer in China. Language is a container of contexts; the translation procedure in MNEs is actually dynamic and contingent in nature and can be seen as an act of knowledge creation per se.

Though there are still political turbulences, the economic cooperation between mainland China and Taiwan is inseparable. Cooperation between enterprises on both sides has become more frequent. Studying the similarities and differences between employees in Cross-Strait enterprises can contribute to human resource management. This paper aims to study the cultural difference between employees of mainland China and in Taiwan when facing psychological contract violations.

A total of 811 valid sample questionnaires were taken from Cross-Strait private enterprise employees. This research adopted partial least squares-structural equation model statistical analysis as an empirical research evaluation.

This study finds that psychological contract violation has a significant positive impact on turnover intention and a significant negative impact on organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) in the Chinese context. There exist cultural differences between the employees of mainland China and Taiwan. When facing psychological contract violation, it is found that employees from Taiwan are more likely to have a strong turnover intention but still keep higher job performance. Employees from mainland China are found to be more likely to have higher OCB.

The originality of this research lies in establishing a stronger theoretical model to understand employee behavior. This paper verifies the validity of this model under the Chinese context. Moreover, this paper verifies the cultural difference between Cross-Strait employees.

Tangible and intangible aspects of living heritage shape the identity of communities whose daily experience is integrated into heritage cultural spaces. Interference in this intricately woven, historically rich context may have significant sociocultural and material consequences for the people inhabiting it. Using the example of the ancient Theban Necropolis and “modern” Gurna, the paper looks at the loss of contemporary cultural heritage in favor of Pharaonic antiquities to question the model of heritage management and development practiced through violence in Egypt.

Written from a decolonial perspective, the paper is positioned within the post-development school of thought. It applies subjectivist epistemology to argue for pluriversality.

Focusing on the historical context of the community of Gurnawis, the paper highlights power inequalities among heritage stakeholders and discusses the violence of coloniality that challenges the freedom of human experiences and representations.

Decolonial in nature, the paper has a futuristic horizon. It calls for decolonization of the discourse of development, which remains marred by the Western understanding of “civilizational advancement” seen as modernization, industrialization and economic growth. It further argues for imagining alternatives to the current social realities, which would account for the diversity of human experiences and consider a pluriverse of meanings.

The paper applies a decolonial perspective to the study of heritage to demonstrate the impact of colonial rationality on the theory and practice of the discipline of archaeology, as well as its consequences for heritage management in Egypt. Speaking from the standpoint of the marginalized population of Gurna, the paper further reveals the damage done by the colonial discourse of development to those who dare to create and live their own reality.

Traditionally health care research is often valued on the evidence‐based basis, which is dominated by statistically motivated quantitative research. However, the increasingly popular use of qualitative methods in general and health research, in particular, has provided a different kind of research evidence, which reflects real‐life issues in social contexts. Though health care qualitative research has provided health care workers, policymakers and the public valuable insights into various aspects of population health, there are issues and problems regarding conducting qualitative research in an intercultural discourse. Sociolinguistic and cultural factors are the main causes of problems facing researchers and policymakers. Concepts such as confidentiality and security are culturally constructed. This paper examines some intercultural awareness issues that need to be considered in the conduct of health care qualitative research and some potential problems in the treatment of health qualitative data. Attention will be given to the Vietnamese health discourse.

This study aims at investigating the impact of some selected organizational and cultural factors on organizational learning (OL). It also attempts to study the moderating role of management support on the influential relationship between these organizational and cultural factors and OL within the context of Jordanian mining sector (JMS).

A descriptive-analytical approach is applied to collect and analyze the data. A survey questionnaire is used as a primary data collection instrument. The study sample includes 400 participants from the seven selected manufacturing companies within the context of JMS. Smart PLS 3 and IBM SPSS version 25 were applied to answer the study questions and to test the hypotheses.

Organization strategy has a statistical significant impact on OL. Moreover, cultural factors (innovation; teamwork; knowledge sharing) have a significant impact on OL. The results of the moderating variable revealed that the level of management support is not moderating the relationship between organizational factors and OL. Nonetheless, it is revealed that management support is moderating the relationship between organizational culture and OL.

It seems that a continuous management support is an important facilitating feature to motivate a learning culture. Cultural attributes, including innovation, teamwork and knowledge sharing must be taken into consideration as facilitating factors to encourage OL. Gradual changes must be introduced to create innovative, teamwork and knowledge-sharing culture. Additionally, a specific strategic goal should be part of the organizational corporate strategy and action plans must be developed to achieve this goal in a systematic manner.

The inclusion of management support as a moderating factor could add an original contribution to the current body of knowledge concerning OL. Moreover, this study argues that the core concept of learning might be there but a systematic process of learning and the contextual factors influencing this concept still need more concern.

Anna Amelina is a senior researcher at the Faculty of Sociology in Bielefeld, Germany. Her research addresses subjects such as social inequality and migration, transnationalization of gender regimes, and methodology of transnational studies. Empirically, she focuses on formation of social inequalities in the context of transnational migration between Germany and Ukraine. Her last publications include “Searching for an appropriate research strategy on transnational migration: The logic of multi-sited research and the advantage of the cultural interferences approach” in Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 11(1), 2009, with Thomas Faist, “Turkish migrant associations in Germany. Between integration pressure and transnational linkages” in Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales (REMI), Vol. 24, 2.

The participation and productivity of women in Oman’s labor force are very low and heavily skewed toward the government sector. There are few women in the private sector and the reasons for this are not well-known. The challenges that women workers face specifically in the Arab World are worth understanding from a participation and policy perspective. The purpose of this paper is to explore employers’ perceptions of women workers and the major challenges they face in Oman in the context of government efforts to develop the female workforce in this Middle East region.

Data collected by interviewing the top executives (employers) from 28 organizations in two major cities in Oman were analyzed qualitatively, grouped into emerging themes, triangulated, and discussed.

The results indicated that employers, in general, are impressed by women workers in Oman. However, they identify a number of challenges women face. This study synthesized and grouped employers’ perceptions of these challenges in the following categories: women’s natural and physiological composition, their attitude at work, post-marital challenges, socio-cultural barriers, nature and place of work, organizational preparedness and governance, biases or prejudices of employers, and work-life balance (WLB) issues facing them.

This study suggests that since female participation in the government sector in Oman is substantial, women can also be attracted to work in the private sector if policies are formulated to safeguard their interests.

There is an absolute dearth of studies about female participation in the Omani workforce; this study is one of the pioneering efforts. Whereas the extant literature on WLB issues represents mostly the western perspective, this study highlights the major WLB issues in Oman and fills some important gaps between the West and the Middle East by focusing on women, WLB, and policies triangle.

Based on stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) theory and a serial multiple mediation model, this study aims to examine the relationships between cultural values and energy-saving behaviors as well as the mediation mechanisms of attitudes towards energy-saving and energy-saving intentions underlying these links.

A sample of 1,514 urban residents collected in five big cities in Vietnam and Structural Equation Modeling were employed to test the hypothesized model.

The study yields that energy-saving behaviors can be directly influenced by long-term orientation, but not by collectivism, while both collectivism and long-term orientation work as stimulus which immediately inspire attitude towards energy-savings and energy-saving intentions. Interestingly, attitudes towards energy-saving and energy-saving intentions not only serve as the most crucial predictors of entrepreneurial behaviors but also cooperate a serial mediation role in the impacts of cultural values on energy-saving behaviors.

The findings of this research can be valuable for policymakers to inspire urban residents’ energy conservation behavior for sustainable development goals.

This study contributes to the pro-environment literature by adopting the S-O-R theory to investigate the impacts of cultural values on the energy-saving attitude-intention-behavior relationships, explain the underlying mediation mechanism of energy-saving attitudes and intentions in transferring the influences of cultural values on energy-saving behaviors, and bridge the attitude-intention-behavior gap in the energy-saving research.

If an information retrieval system is going to be of value to the user then it must give meaning to the information which matches the meaning given to it by the user. The meaning given to music varies according to who is interpreting it – the author/composer, the performer, cataloguer or the listener – and this affects how music is organized and retrieved. This paper aims to examine the meaning of music, how meaning is communicated and suggests this may affect music retrieval.

Musicology is used to define music and examine its functions leading to a discussion of how music has been organised and described. Various ways of establishing the meaning of music are reviewed, focussing on established musical analysis techniques. It is suggested that traditional methods are of limited use with digitised popular music. A discussion of semiotics and a review of semiotic analysis in western art music leads to a discussion of semiotics of popular music and examines ideas of Middleton, Stefani and Tagg.

Agreeing that music exists when communication takes place, a discussion of selected communication models leads to the proposal of a revised version of Tagg's model, adjusting it to include listener feedback.

The outcome of the analysis is a revised version of Tagg's communication model, adapted to reflect user feedback. It is suggested that this revised communication model reflects the way in which meaning is given to music.

This study aims to characterise an intricate, idiosyncratic knowledge-creating mechanism in the modern digital context of cross-cultural business models (CBM). From an integrative socio-cultural and philosophical perspective, the authors suggest a novel concept of polychronic knowledge creation (PKC) and its metaphor to theorise such a complex phenomenon.

This paper is conceptual in nature. It critically reviews the literature characterising the flourishing of information and communication technology (ICT)-driven CBMs and clarifies a research gap. The authors draw a dynamic conceptual framework describing how knowledge is created poly-chronically within CBMs, while also articulating and justifying the occurrence of knowledge icebergs as a manifestation of critical cognitive variances and biases in such contexts.

Building upon existential phenomenology, the authors regard the sea as a parable of the CBM ecosystem and propose the new notion of PKC as a dynamic time-space synthesis and its associated sea-like heuristic metaphor. These elucidate how the intricate interconnectivity of a focal firm with its diverse strategic partners kindles a discursive, multi-path knowledge creation process in ICT-driven CBMs under multiple jurisdictions with manifold cultures.

Implications regarding the role of cross-cultural management in creating new knowledge within CBMs are provided.

The research complements and enriches Nonaka’s (1994) theory and its underlying metaphor “ba” (by incorporating the abstruse yet vital role of culture in the synthesizing process of knowledge creation) to propose the novel ideas of PKC and the sea-like heuristic metaphor in CBMs.