Search results

This study aims to examine how teacher candidates (TCs) in Türkiye and the USA navigate their intercultural communication skills in a telecollaboration project.

Forty-eight TCs participated (26 in Türkiye and 22 in the USA) in the study. TCs discussed critical issues in multicultural education on an online learning platform for six weeks. Their discussions were analyzed using content and discourse analysis.

The findings indicated that TCs approached the telecollaborative space as a translingual contact zone and positioned themselves and their interlocutors in the discourse by using the personal pronouns; I, we, you and they. When they positioned themselves using we (people in Türkiye/USA), they spoke on behalf of everyone included in the scope of we. Their interlocutors responded to these positionings either by accepting this positioning and responding with a parallel positioning or by engaging in translingual negotiation strategies to revise the scope of we and sharing some differences/nuances in beliefs and practices in their community.

When TCs talk about their culture and community in a singular manner using we, they frame them as the same across every member in that community. When they ask questions to each other using you, the framing of the questions prime the respondents to sometimes relay their own specific experiences as the norm or consider experiences from different points of view through translingual negotiation strategies. A singular approach to culture(s) may affect the marginalized communities the most because they are lost in this representation, and their experiences and voices are not integrated in the narratives or integrated with stereotypical representation.

Teachers and teacher educators should first pay attention to their language choices, especially use of pronouns, which may communicate inclusion or exclusion in intercultural conversations. Next, they should prepare their students to adopt and practice language choices that communicate respect for cultural diversity and are inclusive of marginalized populations.

Speakers’ pronoun use includes identity construction in discourse by drawing borders around and between communities and cultures with generalization and particularity, and by patrolling those borders to decide who is included and excluded. As a response, interlocutors use pronouns either to acknowledge those borders and respond with corresponding ones from their own context or negotiate alternative representations or further investigate for particularity or complexity. In short, pronouns could lead the direction of intercultural conversations toward criticality and complexity or otherwise, and might be reasons where there are breakdowns in communication or to fix those breakdowns.

This study shows that translingual negotiation strategies have explanatory power to examine how speakers from different language backgrounds negotiate second and third order positionings in the telecollaborative space.

The purpose of this paper is to present a framework to assist the selection of certification bodies in the implementation of quality management system (QMS) based on ISO 9001 taking into account a set of criteria organized in a multi-level hierarchical form. To deal with this complexity, the multi-criteria decision-making method (MCDM) analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was used in this research.

The research was conducted in small and medium-sized companies certified to ISO 9001. The MCDM method AHP was used as a method for developing the model to support the selection of certification bodies.

This paper provides a framework for companies seeking to hire certification bodies, mainly for ISO 9001 certification, which help identify the companies that best fit the certification objectives. Additionally, a ranking of the main criteria to select certification bodies for ISO 9001 was obtained.

The decision-making method was applied to Brazilian companies from different sectors. As the results can vary between regions and sectors, this is a limitation of the research. In addition, the number of ten respondents could be higher to increase the robustness of the results.

The model assists companies looking for certification, mainly ISO 9001, in the selection of certification bodies contributing in the search for deeper implementations of QMS.

This work has the originality of the application of a decision-making method in the final process of ISO 9001 certification, scarce in the literature. In addition, it defines weights for the criteria involved in the process of selecting certification bodies.

Once the domain of theologians, sociologists and (religion) anthropologists, we have seen more recently how consumer researchers have enriched the study of spirituality and religion. Researching the sacred can be fraught with challenges, in and out of the field. Russell Belk, Samuelson Appau and Diego Rinallo address key questions, issues and conceptualisations in the scholarship on sacred consumption, contemplating the past and mapping future research avenues. A reading list is also included for those interested in joining the authors in this collective discovery of the sacred.

Contributors answered the following four questions: How has the study of sacred consumption evolved since you started researching the field? What would be the critical methodological issues that researchers need to consider when approaching the “sacred”? What are some of the key authors that have influenced your thinking? What do you think will be the key questions that researchers will need to focus on?

Rinallo, Belk and Appau’s reflections on studying the sacred provide food for thought for both novice and weathered researchers alike. Researching the sacred both shapes and is shaped by our positionality: by our insider/outsider status, our gender and race and our cosmovisions as believers or sceptics. Researchers should be mindful and reflective of their subject positionings as they approach, enter and leave the field. Researching the sacred requires an open mind as we broaden our vision of what constitutes the sacred. Such research calls for scholarly as well as phenomenological curiosity. Reading widely and across disciplines to better familiarise ourselves with our sacred context helps to craft novel and meaningful research.

This paper provides a multivocal genealogy of consumer culture work on religion and spirituality, methodological advice and reading resources for researchers.

Hybrid flow shop with multiprocessor task (HFSMT) has received considerable attention in recent years. The purpose of this paper is to consider an HFSMT scheduling under the environment of a common time window. The window size and location are considered to be given parameters. The research deals with the criterion of total penalty cost minimization incurred by earliness and tardiness of jobs. In this research, a new memetic algorithm in which a global search algorithm is accompanied with the local search mechanism is developed to solve the HFSMT with jobs having a common time window. The operating parameters of memetic algorithm have an important role on the quality of solution. In this paper, a full factorial experimental design is used to determining the best parameters of memetic algorithm for each problem type. Memetic algorithm is tested using HFSMT problems.

First, hybrid flow shop scheduling system and hybrid flow shop scheduling with multiprocessor task are defined. The applications of the hybrid flow shop system are explained. Also the background of hybrid flow shop with multiprocessor is given in the introduction. The features of the proposed memetic algorithm are described in Section 2. The experiment results are presented in Section 3.

Computational experiments show that the proposed new memetic algorithm is an effective and efficient approach for solving the HFSMT under the environment of a common time window.

There is only one study about HFSMT scheduling with time window. This is the first study which added the windows to the jobs in HFSMT problems.

The case, while acknowledging the difficulty of managing a family business in view of the accompanying human issues, emphasizes that sound business practices and procedures, and clarity with regard to the goal, remain the key; a firm is a complex, interconnected system and management needs a systems viewpoint; and technology can only support underlying business processes if there is clarity with respect to these.

SomPack had survived low-cost Asian competition starting the mid-1990s, a revolt by some extended family to try and bring it down with the help of a competitor, the Turkish banking crisis of 2001, and the global economic crisis of 2008 all the while watching its suppliers, competitors and customers collapse. A focus on cost-cutting and internal discipline by the successor, who had been promoted to CEO in 2004, had exacerbated internal discontent somewhat and had led to issues with production planning, but everyone understood that times were tough. Several large customers who had left were asked to return because the alternatives had been worse. By 2012, SomPack was considering expansion into new products in collaboration with its international partners. Then one day, in July 2013, it suddenly collapsed. Could the entire approach have been wrong? What should management have done instead?

Undergraduate, graduate business management.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS 7: Management Science.

A long-established cultural norm of filial piety may cause ambivalent feelings for adult children who are considered the primary caregivers for their elderly parents in Turkish culture, and whose parents have been placed into nursing homes. The purpose of this paper is to provide an insight to the lived experiences of adult children of elderly people living in a nursing home in Turkey.

Drawing upon dramaturgical theory and phenomenological methodology, the authors conducted interviews with ten adult children whose elderly parents had been admitted to a nursing home in Izmir, Turkey. Multi-stage purposeful random sampling was used as the sampling scheme. Thematic analysis was performed to interpret the data.

Three themes emerged from the data: adult children’s coping strategies, the ways in which the adult children rationalize their decisions, and the ways in which the adult children manage the placement process. The interviews revealed that the adult children often feel like social outcasts and experience a wide range of difficulties, including social pressures, their own inner dilemmas, and negotiations with their elderly parents.

An exploration for the lived experiences of adult children relating to the nursing home placement of their elderly parents contributes an insight about the well-established cultural norms that produce feelings of ambivalence.

Selecting the most appropriate healthcare waste treatment technology (HCWTT) is an uncertain and complex decision-making problem because there exist more than one alternative and many conflicting qualitative and quantitative criteria. However, the use of fuzzy and comparative values, instead of specific crisp values, provides more accurate results, so that the alternatives may be evaluated in accordance with hesitant human nature. The purpose of this paper is to select the best HCWTT using a hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (HFLTS).

Five main criteria were identified for HCWTT selection, such as economic, social, environmental, technical and ergonomic criteria. In total, 19 sub-criteria were examined, and the hierarchy of the criteria was formed. The criteria weights were determined using the multi-criteria hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (MC-HFLTS). The selection processes of incineration (A₁), steam sterilization (A₂), microwave (A₃) and landfill (A₄) alternatives were carried out using the multi-attributive ideal-real comparative analysis (MAIRCA) and multi-attributive border approximation area comparison (MABAC) methods. In the comparative analyses, Vise Kriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR) and technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) methods were used.

The comparison of the results of the MABAC and MAIRCA methods with the results of VIKOR and TOPSIS methods indicated that A₂ (steam sterilization) alternative was the best one and produced the same ranking of the technology alternatives (A₂ > A₃ > A₁ > A₄). As a result, the study concluded that these methods can be successfully used for HCWTT selection problems.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, MC-HFLTS has not been used to select HCWTT in the existing literature. For the first time, MC-HFLTS&MAIRCA and MC-HFLTS&MABAC approaches were used in order to choose the best treatment method for healthcare waste under the effect of multiple conflicting hierarchical criteria. It has been provided that MABAC and MAIRCA select alternative choices by taking into consideration the hierarchical criteria. Unlike other studies, this study also considered ergonomic criteria that are important for people working during the process of using the treatment technology.

Financial literacy has a strong influence on financial well-being, and it is a concept especially important for college students who start to develop their financial habits. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between financial literacy, money attitudes and time preferences among Turkish university students.

Data were collected from 1,443 university students from 14 campuses in Turkey. Structural equation modeling methodology is employed to test the hypotheses.

The results suggest that students with higher financial knowledge scores have more favorable financial attitudes and exhibit more desirable financial behaviors. It is also demonstrated that financial attitude is positively related to financial behavior. Furthermore, a significant and negative relationship between the affective dimension of the money ethic construct and financial behavior is found. In contrast, the relationship between the behavioral dimension of money ethic and financial behavior is positive. It is further demonstrated that a present orientation leads to more negative financial attitudes.

This study will reveal the interrelationships among dimensions of financial literacy, money ethics and time preferences in an emerging economy with a relatively little experience with formal financial systems and unstable macroeconomic conditions.