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To comment on Brewer and Venaik's review of the misapplication of the national culture dimensions of Hofstede and GLOBE at the individual and other sub‐national levels. This paper supports and extends their critique.

The implausibility of deterministic claims about the multi‐level power of national culture is described and discussed by drawing on a wide range of disciplines (including anthropology, geography, sociology, and historiography).

Descriptions of the characteristics and origins of sub‐national level behaviour based on a priori depictions of national culture values are invalid and misleading.

There are important implications for practitioners. The paper highlights the unsoundness of descriptions of the sub‐national (individuals, consumer segments, organizations, and so forth) which are derived from national‐level depictions of culture and the dangers of ignoring the independent causal influence of non‐national culture and non‐cultural factors.

The ecological fallacy in the national culture literature is located within a wider and long‐standing critique of that fallacy. The paper is the first to show that the fallacy in the national culture literature is often an extreme causal version. It not merely supposes cross‐level equivalence, as in the standard version, but more aggressively, it attributes deterministic power to national culture thus excluding other independent influences and agency.

This article aims to introduce the theoretical underpinnings of a project that contributes to the empirical field research study literature concerning societal cultural and individual value priority effects on explicit preferred leader behaviour of employed businesspeople, and in some cases business students. The article then reviews research studies and results related to the theories and operationalisations.

This particular article is an introduction to the history and systems of the Leader Behaviour Description Questionnaire XII (LBDQXII) instrument to assess preferred leader behaviour priorities, followed by a review of empirical studies employing the instrument.

The findings indicate that the LBDQXII is adequate for the task at hand, and that societal cultural differences moderate variability in preferences for leader behaviour associated with leadership effectiveness. The reputation of the LBDQXII has been damaged by researchers, editors, reviewers, and dissertation and thesis supervisors’ lack of knowledge or disregard of available knowledge concerning the development of the instrument, its use, and proper methods and methodology. The results in the project studies indicate that similarities such as the same local language coupled with geographic proximity lead to similar kinds of preferred leader behaviour priorities between countries and within countries having diverse sub‐cultures, such as China. Although the samples were all employed businesspeople, sample differences can have significant effects, such as influence stemming industry membership. A conclusion is that, carefully applied and analysed, the LBDQXII is a useful, reliable, and valid survey instrument that can be employed to prepare, educate, and develop expatriates and local managers as to what behaviours are expected in business organisations in different cultures.

The reliabilities of some scales in the LBDQXII are low for some dimension scales for some countries. An objective of the research project is to produce a shorter, more reliable survey for use across cultures. Studies in the project indicate an influence on factor structure apparently due to the overarching analytic cognition or holistic cognition nature of a society.

The practical implications of the project are to identify and measure preferred leader behaviour dimensions that are similar and different across national and sub‐national cultures. Such information can be used to develop global leaders and to educate and train managerial leaders for success in multiple countries. A conclusion is that the LBDQXII can be employed to prepare, educate, and develop expatriates and local managers for international assignments.

Explicit theories of leadership (ELTs) and implicit theories of leadership (ILTs) have received varying amounts of attention in leadership research. Reading the leadership literature, the author finds little consideration of ELTs (explicit theories of leadership), most study and report on implicit traits, or a mixture of implicit and explicit. A major contribution of this research project and this special issue of the journal is the development of testing and support of an explicit theory of leadership and presenting progress in its operationalisation, and it evaluates a widely used survey instrument across cultures.

The world consists of diverse and distinctive economic systems. Due to the unique historical, cultural and location-specific contexts embedded in each economy, a comparison of strategic behaviors across economies is unlikely to provide a causal estimate of the influence of these contextual factors on strategy–performance relationships. In this paper, I outline three approaches to researching multinational firms that address this dilemma. They include the multilevel, historical and variance-centered perspectives, all of which can help international-business (IB) researchers develop stronger theoretical foundations from which to explain why country-specific contexts matter in designing IB action and research.

With its capabilities for business mapping, geospatial analysis and its contribution to decision making, geographic information system (GIS) seems to be a valuable tool especially applicable in the discipline tourism geography. The capabilities of geospatial analysis for tourist consumer research at destinations will be exemplified by the case of German low-cost carrier passengers (LCCP) on Majorca island, Spain, one of the worlds' leading coastal mass holiday destinations with an annual visitor demand of around 10 million arrivals. The survey puts together primary and secondary research to profile LCCP groups located in different tourism spaces around the island. The approach as well as results shall motivate stakeholders in the tourism industry, especially destinations, to enlarge their marketing and management issues towards geospatial analysis.

Studies repeatedly have found social disparities of health at many levels of spatial aggregation. A second body of empirical research, demonstrating relationships between an area's racial and class composition and its environmental conditions, has led to the rise of an environmental justice movement. However, few studies have connected these two sets of findings to ask whether social disparities in health outcomes are due to local environmental disparities. This chapter investigates whether the association between racial and socioeconomic composition and multiple health conditions across New York City zip codes is partly mediated by neighborhood physical, built, and social environments.

This study aims to compare academic prescriptive models on how to choose a branding strategy on the continuum from a “branded house” to a “house of brands” with real-life branding strategies of leading companies.

Data from an executive survey, observations and desk research on 75 leading companies in Austria are analysed with multilevel weighted least squares (WLS) regression.

Branding strategies for products are determined by industry (23 per cent of variance), the overall strategy of the company (28 per cent), the remaining variance being product-level decisions deviating from both. Service and consumer durables companies lean more towards corporate branding than consumer nondurables. On the company level, synergies in advertising, e-commerce and e-CRM (customer-relationship management) increase the usage of shared brands. A higher company age leads to brand proliferation. On the product level, quality differences between products, the emphasis on and differences in experiential product positioning and, marginally, the symbolic differences between products favour individual brands.

Future research should investigate additional markets, additional drivers, small and medium-sized entreprises (SMEs) and employ additional measures.

The study informs brand-architecture audits with benchmarks from leading companies, calls for a view of brand architecture more flexible than ideal-type categories proposed in literature and cautions against management inertia, industry standards and trends in designing branding strategies.

This study is the first quantitative cross-industry multi-level study on real-life branding strategies. It also applies a new conceptualisation and measurement of branding strategy.

While some studies have found that cognitive biases are detrimental to entrepreneurial performance, others have conjectured that cognitive biases may stimulate entrepreneurial action. This study uses a typology of availability and representative heuristics to examine how two patterns of biases affect entrepreneurial performance. Drawing on ideas from cognitive science, this study predicts that various levels of biases in each pattern stimulate entrepreneurial behavior and performance.

A profile-deviation approach was employed to analyze data from 253 entrepreneurs and zero-truncated Poisson regression and the zero-truncated negative binomial regression to test hypotheses.

This study finds some positive associations between a particular level of cognitive biases in each of the two patterns and entrepreneurial behavior and performance. Results show that the patterns of biases often stimulate and never hurt entrepreneurial behavior and performance. The opposite holds for a lack of cognitive biases, which hurts and never stimulates entrepreneurial behavior and performance.

This study examines patterns of cognitive biases of entrepreneurs instead of single biases. The study broadens the perspective on the heuristics and cognitive biases of entrepreneurs by examining patterns of biases emanating from the availability and the representativeness heuristic that make a difference for entrepreneurial behavior and performance. The study also brings the “great rationality debate” closer to the entrepreneurship field by showing that a normative rule based on statistics and probability theory does not benefit entrepreneurial behavior and performance.

In 1994, Dutton questioned whether there is an ecological fallacy within the feminist views of wife assault. To address this concern, he examined the literature regarding dyadic family power and violence. The main goal in this paper is to re‐evaluate the results of the Dutton paper on the basis of new literature.

In this paper, post‐1994 evidence is presented against the feminist paradigm of patriarchy, which can lead directly to this ecological fallacy. The assertions of this feminist paradigm positing that domestic violence is often linked to patriarchal values and is mainly caused by males, whereas female violence is primarily defensive and reactive, are well‐founded criticized.

The data analysed in this paper support Dutton's conclusions in the context of female perpetrated violence within heterosexual intimate partnerships, female sexual offense, child abuse and bullying, violence in female same‐sex relationships, and gender stereotypes.

An accurate overview of the post‐1994 literature the topics discussed in this paper is offered.

The ability to identify the root causes of leading environmental crises, and the capacity to design effective intervention strategies, rely on a proper conceptualization of the linkages that join the social and natural worlds. An indispensable feature of an integrated model concerns the temporal frequencies intrinsic to the spatial and organizational hierarchies that comprise the socio-ecological system. The purpose of this chapter is to assemble ideas from a wide range of disciplines to promote a greater sensitivity to the relevance of time, and to alert us to the conceptual challenges of introducing temporal considerations into interdisciplinary environmental studies.

The purpose of this paper, in the context of the employment equity (EE) field, is to explore the relationship between individual values/beliefs and simulated hiring decisions of minority candidates in Canada, France and Ireland.

Individual values/beliefs were elicited using Likert type scales; subjects responded to a series of simulated hiring scenarios.

The link between individual value and belief systems and EE‐related HR decision making on recruitment of minority candidates is modestly supported by the findings presented here. The values/beliefs of students from leading business schools influenced, if in part, their simulated hiring decisions on minority candidates presented in the scenarios. National context also matters as EE institutions differ at the societal level of analysis.

The subjects were business school students of limited work experience addressing scenario situations, not practicing managers making real hiring decisions. The use of self‐reports leads to the usual issues related to common method variance, the consistency motif, social desirability bias, and so on and we note the limits due to the reverse ecological fallacy. Research findings provide modest support to this argument but should be treated with caution.

Individual values and beliefs matter in HR decision making on recruitment of minority candidates.

Much EE research focuses on antecedents of values/beliefs; this paper is one of a handful of investigations that attempts to establish possible outcomes of values/beliefs towards EE.