Search results

The topic of this article provides a discussion on the importance of well‐defined concepts and approaches used by scholars and by practitioners in various contexts. It is troublesome when the use of a concept or an approach is ambiguous and confusing. The discussion focuses on, and is exemplified through, the globalization of business activities and the term “global strategy”. The widespread use of popular jargon cannot cover the fact that a genuine or true global strategy approach appears to be a managerial utopia. The terms “glocal strategy” and the “glocalization” of business activities are introduced to enhance the accuracy of the present usage by scholars and by practitioners of the term global strategy and the phenomenon often described as the globalization of business activities.

The purpose of this research is to study creative strategy and execution as opposed to all elements of marketing and advertising standardization. It explores the standardization model (e.g. global, glocal, local, and single case strategy) by examining the international advertising strategies that multinational corporations (MNCs) from North America, Europe, and Asia used in their advertising campaigns targeting two culturally different markets: the United States and China.

A content analysis of 210 print advertisements compares the extent of standardization in creative strategy and execution across product country of origin (Japan, Korea, Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States). Western versus non‐Western cultural cues are also coded and examined.

Overall, MNCs are more likely to adopt the glocal strategy than any other strategies in their international campaigns. Specifically, EU‐based MNCs tend to pursue the global strategy, whereas the North America‐based MNCs seem to favor the glocal strategy and Asia‐based MNCs tend to use local strategy. Western and non‐Western cultural values are found to manifest in the American and Chinese ads similarly, indicating a trend of increasing similarity in international advertising in face of global consumer culture.

The results of this content analysis provide a fuller picture in understanding the long‐standing issues of standardization in international advertising because of an approach to analyze creative strategy separately from execution. However, content analysis is inherently limited in inferring causality between observed patterns and mechanisms/variables that account for the patterns. Also, the time frame for sample selection, which is set as a year prior to the 2008 global financial crisis, is another limitation of the study.

There is an ongoing trend of using “one‐creative, multiple‐execution” strategy in international advertising. MNCs may distinguish advertising creative strategy from execution when developing their international advertising campaigns.

First, this study addresses the issue with a clear conceptual definition of standardization and differentiates the strategic and tactic standardization. Second, this is the first attempt to explore the standardization model using a sample of 51 multinational brands from North America, Europe, and Asia. The authors find that MNCs are practicing some standardization advertising strategy, but to varying degrees. Third, this study identifies and empirically tests two external factors – culture and convergence of external markets – that influence standardization.

The purpose of this paper is to provide the authors’ response to three commentaries (Batra and Wu, 2019; Papadopoulos, 2019; Westjohn and Magnusson, 2019) on Strizhakova and Coulter (2019), “Consumer cultural identities: local and global cultural identities and measurement implications,” International Marketing Review.

This is a conceptual paper and a response to commentaries on the initial paper Strizhakova and Coulter (2019), “Consumer cultural identity: local and global cultural identities and measurement implications”.

This paper continues an important dialogue on the topic of multifaceted consumer cultural identities. Specifically, the authors discuss the myriad meanings of cultural identity, as well as meanings of global, local, disinterested/disidentified and glocal cultural beliefs. The paper offers directions and poses questions that warrant future research attention and have important implications for global and local brand managers.

The paper addresses important issues and future research directions about the provocative topic of consumer cultural identities, their meanings, measurements and practical/research implications.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a framework for considering the interplay between local (national) and global (world-based) identities and consumption practices with attention to various conceptualizations and measurements of consumer cultural identity.

This is a conceptual paper reviewing major works on consumer cultural identities and offering a framework for future considerations of the interplay between global and local identities.

The framework identifies two dimensions which underlie consumer cultural identity conceptualizations and measurements: first, consumer engagement with globalization–localization discourses, and second, more general identity beliefs vs consumption-based identity beliefs. Clustering and categorical measure approaches (vs a compensatory approach) are preferred for identifying and exploring global/local/glocal and unengaged consumer cultural identity segments. Research foci should guide use of global and/or local general identity vs consumption-based identity beliefs as predictors of marketplace outcomes or as segmentation variables.

The conceptualization of consumer cultural identity is based on Berry et al.’s (1986) early work on acculturation and Arnett’s (2002) bicultural identity theorizing, and thus the authors acknowledge four consumer segments, those with: stronger global (weaker local) identity, stronger local (weaker global) identity, strong global and local identities and those unengaged with global–local discourses. The authors review measurement approaches to examine consumer cultural identity and determine that categorical and clustering (vs compensatory) approaches are consistent with the conceptualization of consumer cultural identity segments.

International marketers can gain insights into major conceptualizations and measurements of consumer cultural identity, and understand the advantages and limitations of different measurement approaches. The authors highlight two important dimensions underlying cultural identity that demand managers’ attention and consideration for strategic decisions. Social implications – this paper brings attention to various conceptualizations and measures of consumer cultural identity, highlighting the need to further examine differences between various cultural identity segments, specifically the unengaged consumers and glocally engaged consumers.

The paper provides a broadened lens to understanding conceptualizations and measurements of consumer cultural identity, identifying two dimensions underlying consumer cultural identity: consumer engagement with globalization–localization discourses, and more general identity beliefs vs consumption-based identity beliefs.

The continuation of globalisation and liberalisation processes has prompted the restructuring of many national and local property markets. The research examines the evolution of Istanbul's retail property market to identify how global and local agents engage with one another to produce a unique “glocalized” outcome.

The morphogenetic approach is adapted and applied to analyse the dynamics of market change. The focus is on the character and behaviour of national and international market actors and how they interact with the wider political economy. The research uses a combination of elite interviews, document analysis and corporate case studies to obtain empirical evidence.

The liberalisation of the Turkish economy heralded the entry of the first international companies into Istanbul's retail property market in the 1990s. International involvement expanded rapidly after 2004, accelerating the process of market re-structuring. However, while the number of global buy-outs increased, the expansion of local property companies–and the establishment of some international/national corporate partnerships–was even more marked. This resulted in a “glocalised” market with a strong and distinctive local culture.

Istanbul has been a major centre of trade for millenia. This is the first substantive analysis of the recent restructuring of the city's retail property market. Previous research on market maturity and market evolution has paid limited attention to the dynamics of change. The paper describes the use of a process-based theoretical framework (morphogenesis) that was explicitly designed to analyse structural shifts in socio-economic conditions through an examination of the characteristics and behaviours of the actors involved.

This is a case study of Coca‐Cola's Chinese web site. It aims to examine how Coca‐Cola, the number one brand in the world, is using its web site to communicate with the publics in the world's largest market.

Uses a qualitative text analysis.

Coca‐Cola is practicing a “glocal” strategy, which integrates the ethnocentric and polycentric model in international public relations, to communicate with the Chinese publics through its Chinese web site.

This study provides insights for understanding the theory and practice of global corporate public relations.

In this concluding chapter the empirical research on work restructuring that is presented in the different chapters is related to the central question of this volume: in which way is the global produced and reproduced in the local and what does this mean for the (re)structuring of the local? The central themes of the introductory chapter of this volume are taken into account: the increasing impact of the cultural on the economical sphere, the strategic effect of various organizational options, the coming into being of new sectors, labor relations in a globalizing world and the tension between clusterization and relocation of labor. In the last part of this contribution some remarks are made on a possible direction of further research in the field of work restructuring in its glocal context.

In his recent book Critique of Information, Scott Lash claims that contemporary times can better be understood as the information age rather than as postmodernism, the risk society, late capitalism, consumer society, etc. “Information society is, first, preferable to postmodernism”, he states, “in that the former says what the society principle is rather than saying merely what it comes after. Second, postmodernism deals largely with disorder, fragmentation, irrationality, whilst the notion of information accounts for both the (new) order and disorder that we experience.” He goes on to delineate the great difference that he sees between narrative and discourse, on the one hand, and information as it is presented by the media on the other. “Unlike, say, narrative or discourse or painting, the information in the papers comes in very short messages. It is compressed. Literally compressed. Narrative as in the novel works from a beginning, middle and end. The subjective intentions of the protagonist are the motor of the plot, the events follow from one an other as causes and effects. Discourse ‐ as in philosophic or social scientific texts ‐ is comprised of conceptual frameworks, of serious speech acts, of propositional logic, of speech acts backed up by legitimating arguments. Information is none of these.”. In fact, Lash suggests that, “the primary qualities of information are flow, disembeddedness, spatial compression, temporal compression, real‐time relations.” He ends his interpretation of our contemporary society with the conclusion that “informational knowledge is increasingly displacing narrative and discursive knowledge”.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the current glocal (global and local) environment to answer the following research questions: How does the glocal environment influence software exporting industries in India? How is the evolving “sticky” knowledge from individuals and teams assimilated into organizational knowledge repositories? What management practices have been learnt and applied for advancement of knowledge portfolios in the offshore software business market?

An interpretivist research design is used to gain insights into organizational learning processes adopted by offshore software vendors for assimilating evolving knowledge into knowledge repositories.

This paper describes the influence of the current glocal environment on software exporting industries in India and presents a model for organizational learning to assimilate knowledge and build effective representations of emerging knowledge artifacts. The authors employ the concept of meta‐learning (or “learning about learning”) to analyze the recursive nature of organizational learning processes.

The proposed model of meta‐learning explains how software organizations build on individual and team competencies to build core competencies. The model helps us to understand how organizations advance their learning processes and upgrade their knowledge repositories.

The paper offers new perspectives on how organizations reflexively monitor their knowledge processes to advance their knowledge portfolios. It identifies adhocratic and bureaucratic management processes for assimilating the evolving “sticky” knowledge from individuals into organizational knowledge repositories. This paper contributes to the growing body of literature that emphasizes ongoing learning from individual to collective level in the knowledge industry sector.

This study aims to unravel the tensions and convergences between market-oriented neoliberal education and state-serving transnational higher education (TNHE) practices through an infrastructural lens within the broad context of post-pandemic geopolitics.

The study utilizes a case study approach, with a diverse array of data collection methods, including observations, interviews and review of material/online documents issued by the TNHE-related institutions and the Chinese Ministry of Education.

The study identifies three findings: (1) Re-articulation of transnational infrastructures, valuing ‘glocal' education and casting immobility as advantageous yet quasi-mobile; (2) Infrastructural tensions arising from stakeholder contests over program control and (3) Infrastructural dialectics, illustrating how promised (im)mobility becomes a tightly regulated academic journey due to institutional constraints and conflicts.

The findings elucidate the dynamic interplay between international education and TNHE amidst neoliberal pedagogical trends and pandemic-driven geopolitical shifts in China. While the interplay showcased a notable effect on Chinese students' (im)mobility during the pandemic, more empirical research is needed to understand international student (im)mobility issues in the post-pandemic era.

This study explores the infrastructural intersections between international and transnational education during the unprecedented Covid-19. Findings may provide a reference for policymakers and practitioners to strategize the “glocal” approach to international/transnational education in China after the pandemic.