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The purpose of this chapter is to analyze the possible portfolio diversification opportunities between Asian Islamic market and other regions’ Islamic markets; namely USA, Europe, and BRIC. This study makes the initial attempt to fill in the gaps of previous studies by focusing on the proxies of global Islamic markets to identify the correlations among those selected markets by employing the recent econometric methodologies such as multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic–dynamic conditional correlations (MGARCH–DCC), maximum overlap discrete wavelet transform (MODWT), and the continuous wavelet transform (CWT). By utilizing the MGARCH-DCC, this chapter tries to identify the strength of the time-varying correlation among the markets. However, to see the time-scale-dependent nature of these mentioned correlations, the authors utilized CWT. For robustness, the authors have applied MODWT methodology as well. The findings tend to indicate that the Asian investors have better portfolio diversification opportunities with the US markets, followed by the European markets. BRIC markets do not offer any portfolio diversification benefits, which may be explained partly by the fact that the Asian markets cover partially the same countries of BRIC markets, namely India and China. Considering the time horizon dimension, the results narrow down the portfolio diversification opportunities only to the short-term investment horizons. The very short-run investors (up to eight days only) can benefit through portfolio diversification, especially in the US and European markets. The above-mentioned results have policy implications for the Asian Islamic investors (e.g., Portfolio Management and Strategic Investment Management).

This chapter focuses on brokerage in the prestige economy of the Gabor Roma ethnic subgroup in Romania. It argues that the necessity of the brokers’ employment as well as their economic importance comes from the significant uncertainty characterising the prestige-object transactions, that is, these brokers are occasional entrepreneurs specialised in risk management. The theoretical purpose of the chapter is to demonstrate that brokers and goods mediated by them can be associated with more than one socially constructed transactional identity (cultural, political, economic, etc.) at the same time. It also aims to highlight the shifting nature of these identities – they are not constant and context-free qualities, but highly context-sensitive social constructions that can appear in various combinations.

The chapter depicts the potential place of the spirit of non-violence and the spirit of peace in social affairs and economic circumstances. It deals with the approach of Mahatma Gandhi to non-violence and the approach of Saint Francis of Assisi to noble poverty, simplicity and peace as one of the great inspirations to Gandhi. These two concepts are closely interrelated, as they have analogous aspects in theory and practice. Both of them seem suitable to be used as the main characteristics of dealing with social and ecological problems.

The following part of the chapter describes the life and the credo of Mahatma Gandhi, emphasizing the importance of non-violence, an alternative approach to deal with emerging social difficulties. After it, the chapter presents the life and the philosophy of Saint Francis of Assisi and how Gandhi was inspired by him. It emphasizes the importance of peace, noble poverty, simplicity and their spirit in ecological and social affairs. The chapter then presents non-violence and poverty as spiritual notions and shows intermediary concepts and examples of feasible business models by which they could be applied in economic practices. Non-violence and peace can be the spirit of business strategies, and they have the potential to transform modern economic practices into a more humanistic and sustainable form.

Following a distinction between verbal dialogue and socioaffective dialogue, this chapter shows how psychosocial organization is generated by the socioaffective aspects of communication. Verbal dialogue (based on language and symbols), is shown to fit with Shannon's (1949) concept of information, reduction in uncertainty, and socioaffective dialogue (based on the arousal and regulation of affective energy) to fit with Gabor's (1946) concept, minimum of uncertainty. An empirically-based theory of communication (Bradley & Pribram, 1997, 1998), that applies Gabor's concept, views the interaction between affective energy and social control as an information processing system. When optimally organized as socioaffective dialogue, the interaction gathers and communicates holographic-like descriptions of endogenous organization throughout a social unit to in-form (give shape to) collective organization. However, both verbal and socioaffective aspects of interaction are required for optimal communication-the former processes the cognitive elements, while the latter processes the configural aspects of social life.

The chapter aims to reflectively discuss a participatory research project concerning the future of higher education in Hungary. This project can be understood as an ongoing methodological experiment which attempts to engage teachers and students, in order to reveal how key stakeholders think about the future of higher education. In line with this, this methodologically oriented chapter shows how different participatory methodologies can be combined in a so-called backcasting framework. This approach starts by describing the present situation, then moves beyond the present conditions so as to identify the cornerstones of an ideal future state. On the one hand, the chapter gives a detailed introduction to how our participatory research process was set up and what particular methodologies we used during this process. On the other hand, it critically reflects on the methodological and ethical challenges involved.

Increasing awareness around the world of the environmental impact of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions resulting from human activities such as air travel warrants consideration of the effects of research and activities within the field of Comparative and International Education (CIE). The authors hypothesize that consideration of CIE research’s environmental impact is seldom, if ever, discussed in the literature. To test this hypothesis, the authors conduct a content analysis of articles published in selected major CIE journals to analyze how researchers account for their environmental impact. In addition to presenting the findings of this analysis, the authors provide a selection of queries for examining one’s own practices as a CIE researcher in relation to environmental sustainability. The authors provide preliminary suggestions for ways to reduce GHG production and the environmental impact of continued CIE research and call for acknowledgement of these impacts in publications. Ultimately, the authors suggest that more needs be done to examine CIE scholars’ ecological impact in conducting research and use this chapter as a starting point for conversations in this vein.

The study here responds to the view that the crucial problem in strategic management (research) is firm heterogeneity – why firms adopt different strategies and structures, why heterogeneity persists, and why competitors perform differently. The present study applies complexity theory tenets and a “neo-configurational perspective” of Misangyi et al. (2016) in proposing complex antecedent conditions affecting complex outcome conditions. Rather than examining variable directional relationships using null hypotheses statistical tests, the study examines case-based conditions using somewhat precise outcome tests (SPOT). The complex outcome conditions include firms with high financial performances in declining markets and firms with low financial performances in growing markets – the study focuses on seemingly paradoxical outcomes. The study here examines firm strategies and outcomes for separate samples of cross-sectional data of manufacturing firms with headquarters in one of two nations: Finland (n = 820) and Hungary (n = 300). The study includes examining the predictive validities of the models. The study contributes conceptual advances of complex firm orientation configurations and complex firm performance capabilities configurations as mediating conditions between firmographics, firm resources, and the two final complex outcome conditions (high performance in declining markets and low performance in growing markets). The study contributes by showing how fuzzy-logic computing with words (Zadeh, 1966) advances strategic management research toward achieving requisite variety to overcome the theory-analytic mismatch pervasive currently in the discipline (Fiss, 2007, 2011) – thus, this study is a useful step toward solving the crucial problem of how to explain firm heterogeneity.

Facial expression recognition by human observers is affected by subjective components. Indeed there is no ground truth. We have developed Discrete Choice Models (DCM) to capture the human perception of facial expressions. In a first step, the static case is treated, that is modelling perception of facial images. Image information is extracted using a computer vision tool called Active Appearance Model (AAM). DCMs attributes are based on the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), Expression Descriptive Units (EDUs) and outputs of AAM. Some behavioural data have been collected using an Internet survey, where respondents are asked to label facial images from the Cohn–Kanade database with expressions. Different models were estimated by likelihood maximization using the obtained data. In a second step, the proposed static discrete choice framework is extended to the dynamic case, which considers facial video instead of images. The model theory is described and another Internet survey is currently conducted in order to obtain expressions labels on videos. In this second Internet survey, videos come from the Cohn–Kanade database and the Facial Expressions and Emotions Database (FEED).

This chapter addresses the issue of the Global South external debt by mobilizing insights from Modern Monetary Theory, Ecological Economics, and Dependency Theory. It argues that the external debt problem of Southern governments is a reflection of their subordinate economic and monetary status. It shows why the argument of foreign currency shortage often used to explain the need for Southern governments to issue foreign currency debts remains superficial. In contrast to the usual focus on creditors, the chapter highlights the role played by foreign direct investment in the genesis of the chronic external indebtedness of most Southern countries. It argues then that the external debt of the South must be understood holistically not only as a manifestation of the unequal ecological exchange between the North and the South but also as an instrument that has contributed to reproducing and amplifying this pattern. Under these conditions, the cancellation or restructuring of the South's external debt stock and a few other unlikely concessions by the Northern countries will not be enough to abolish the “debt system.” This is an important lesson from the antiimperialist critique of the mid-1970s New International Economic Order (NIEO) agenda that current movements for Southern debt cancellation and Climate Justice would do well to remember.