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Recent scholarship has highlighted the complexity of buyer-seller relationships in emerging markets and called for a better understanding of the cultural norms shaping such relationships. This paper aims to draw on social capital theory to explore the role of networks and relational norms, such as wasta, in Arab culture on consumer relational behaviors. The Arab market constitutes a significant economy and social networks and relational norms are of significant value in Arab culture.

A qualitative approach was used to address the research questions. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 19 male and female consumers across Lebanon over a four-month period.

Social networks are heavily used in relational behaviors to achieve four types of goals, namely, self-serving goals, unity goals and equality goals and relationship maintenance goals. In fulfilling these goals consumers create economies of favors that aim at the using and maintenance of communal bonds.

This study was conducted in one geographical context. While Lebanon shares many of its characteristics with other Arab countries, future research should aim at exploring the influence of social networks in other Arab and emerging market contexts.

Consumers have different motivations between formal and informal markets. The research suggests that small sellers in highly embedded markets need to use their social networks and to make their stories authentic and known within their communities to facilitate emotional connections with consumers.

Emerging markets offer opportunities to extend our understanding of marketing theory and practice. This research provides a richer understanding of Arab consumers and suggests that wasta relationships play a role in consumptive decisions and not just in business negotiations. Wasta, as a cultural form of cultural capital, is heavily used in consumption as a coping mechanism to overcome market inefficiencies.

Catholic social thought presents itself as a reflection by the Church on socio‐economic issues. The Church in its teachings has always had, and continues to have, an ambivalent attitude towards the capitalist economic system. This ambivalence has not always expressed itself in the most effective and appropriate ways. Attempts to argue that social analysis from a critical theory perspective is both able to capture effectively the ambivalence which Catholic social thought feels towards capitalism, and to put into a broader theoretical context many of the critiques levelled against the Church′s teachings. This in turn allows for a more cogent presentation of the Church′s normative project.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate critically the narrative that the informal economy in Africa has no place within the framework of economic development. Considered as a sign of “backwardness”, “traditionalism” and “underdevelopment”, the informal economy in Africa has persistently grown notwithstanding Africa’s economic destabilisation through the adoption of neo-liberal economic interventions and free-market policies. This paper argues that the informal economy cannot be marginalised at the fringes of economic development, in the construction of a holistic development pathway.

The methodological basis is discourse analysis.

The outcome is a call to re-think and open up the feasibility, and possibilities for, alternative economic futures beyond free-market capitalism.

This paper makes a critical consideration on one of the multiple narratives that continue to inform economic policy making in Africa, by contesting and deconstructing its basis in order to encourage a pluralistic approach and understanding.

This chapter uses an analytic procedure to uncover how Saddam Hussein made his past decisions, and the decision rule(s) Saddam adopted in choosing his actions. In analyzing Saddam, a leader who was considered one of the most formidable enemies of the Western world, this study utilizes official recordings captured at the Iraq war, which provide a reliable source of information. This chapter adds to the literature on the use of applied decision analysis (ADA) in analyzing leaders’ decisions.

Specifically, an emphasis is placed on the importance of understanding the process that led Saddam Hussein to his key decisions, in order to create his decision profile. Decision profiles describe the decision rules and models that are used by decision-makers en route to choice and can help understand and predict decisions of world leaders. I use the ADA procedure to examine key foreign policy decisions made by Saddam Hussein. Finally, after thoroughly examining each of these decisions, I attempt to uncover what decision rule Saddam used, and elaborate on the implications and recommendations of my analysis.

The “first generation” (Lammers, 1978, p. 486) of comparative analysis of organizations in sociology (e.g., Blau, 1965; Stinchcombe, 1959) focused on the “nuts and bolts” of organizational structure as the key criterion with which to derive organizational typologies (Perrow, 1967; Pugh, Hickson, & Hinings, 1969). This initial cohort of analysts saw the intrinsic features – or “organizational attributes” (Blau, 1965, p. 326) – constitutive of the “technical core” of the organization, such as features related to the organization of the production process (Perrow, 1967) or the structure of allocation of discretion and authority (e.g., Etzioni, 1961), as the royal road to the development of a cogent approach to comparative analysis of organizations.

This article discusses local cultural policies addressing popular music, and the values they imply, through a case study of Strasbourg's Espace Django, a publicly financed concert venue located in a disadvantaged neighborhood.

Espace Django's structural organization and overall cultural “philosophy” are described on the basis of field interviews and several documents related to the venue; they are then discussed in relation to literature on urban cultural policies and French policies concerning popular music.

Espace Django's activities embody a will to improve social interactions within local communities. The venue does not fit in either the “music city” or the “creative cluster” theoretical model. However, its policies belong to the French institutional tradition of Développement Culturel, and they express a tendency toward eventification and the experience economy.

In France, the public sector plays an important role in cultural practices, mostly through funding and policymaking. The example of Espace Django adds a distinct French perspective to a research field mainly centered on Anglo-Saxon countries and more liberal economies. Also, the appendix on Espace Django's response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) health crisis adds interesting elements for understanding what are the successful choices in the current cultural scenario.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the role of tacit knowledge in successful knowledge‐based cities. It focuses on a case study of Hsinchu Science Park in Taiwan. The growth of successful knowledge‐based cities is dependent on three interrelated processes that create and transfer tacit knowledge in cities: local knowledge creation, transfer of knowledge from external sources and transfer of that knowledge into productive activities. Researchers need to focus on processes for the creation and transfer of tacit knowledge in cities, and designers and policy makers of knowledge‐based cities need to focus on creating tacit knowledge in cities. Discusses the connection between tacit knowledge and growth of global cities.

Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.

Western researchers studying the former Soviet Union first paid attention to the phenomenon of blat — to do with the use of informal contacts and networks to obtain goods and services or to influence decision making — in the 1950s. Yet although the importance of blat has been pointed to, there have been no attempts — and in fact no possibility — to study it. This article is based on original data gathered in 56 in‐depth interviews conducted during fieldwork in Russia in August 1994‐April 1995. The window of opportunity for such research occurred after people ceased being inhibited talking about blat, while still having a fresh memory of the Soviet period. These materials are unique. They enabled the author, first, to develop an ethnography of blat — that is to present it as a distinctive form of social relationship or social exchange articulating private interests and human needs against rigid control of the state; second, to record the daily problems which represent the ex‐Soviet system in a light not readily seen by an outsider; and third, to conceptualise the phenomenon of blat thus relating it to other informal practices. In this article focus will mostly be on the third angle of the research.