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This paper aims to highlight differences between business and non-business literature regarding base of the pyramid (BoP) and subsistence contexts and reveal discourse’s powerful role in influencing goals, solutions and outcomes.

This paper uses critical discourse analysis to review a convenience sample of business versus non-business literature on the BoP and subsistence contexts.

Discourse used in business literature on the BoP is oriented toward hegemonic Western capitalist approaches that result in the depletion of resources, resource inequalities, poverty and increased consumption, dependence and environmental degradation and, therefore, cannot alleviate poverty.

There are two primary limitations: the study relied on a convenience sample that was not random and comparatively, the business BoP literature is not as mature as the non-business subsistence literature and, therefore, the BoP field of study is not yet fully developed.

Discourse has a powerful role in revealing assumptions and guiding actions. A change in BoP discourse toward a strength-based approach can serve as a model of sustainability and can help powerful entities enact structural and systemic change.

This paper reveals the role of discourse in business BoP literature and how it perpetuates and even exacerbates the problems they were designed to alleviate: depletion of resources, resource inequalities, poverty and increased consumption, dependence and environmental degradation. The paper challenges researchers, economists and powerful guiding entities to reorient their discourse of the BoP to be more aligned with those of non-business researchers of subsistence markets.

This study aims to explore gender performance in entrepreneurial pitching. Understanding pitching as a social practice, the authors argue that pitch content and body gestures contain gender-based norms and practices. The authors focus on early-stage ventures and the hegemonic masculinities and femininities that are performed in entrepreneurial pitches. The main research question is as follows: How is gender performed in entrepreneurial pitching?

The authors carried out the study with the post-structuralist feminist approach. The authors collected and analyzed nine online pitches with the reflexive thematic method to depict hegemonic masculinities and femininities performed at the pitch.

The authors found that heroic and breadwinner masculinities are dominant in pitching. Both male and female founders perform hegemonic masculinities. Entrepreneurs are expected to be assertive but empathetic people. Finally, there are connections between what entrepreneurs do and what investors ask, indicating the iteration of gender performance and expectations.

While the online setting helps the authors to collect data during the pandemic, it limits the observation of the place, space and interactions between the judges/investors and the entrepreneurs. As a result, the linguistic and gesture communication of the investors in the pitch was not discussed in full-length in this paper. Also, as the authors observed, people would come to the pitch knowing what they should perform and how they should interact. Therefore, the preparation of the pitch as a study context could provide rich details on how gender norms and stereotypes influence people's interactions and their entrepreneurial identity. Lastly, the study has a methodological limitation. The authors did not include aspects of space in the analysis. It is mainly due to the variety of settings that the pitching sessions that the data set had.

For social practices and policies, the results indicate barriers to finance for women entrepreneurs. Women entrepreneurs are rewarded when they perform entrepreneurial hegemonic masculinities with a touch of emphasized femininities. Eventually, if women entrepreneurs do not perform correctly as investors expect them to, they will face barriers to acquiring finance. It is important to acknowledge how certain gendered biases might be (re)constructed and (re)produced through entrepreneurial activities, in which pitching is one of them.

Practitioners could utilize research findings to understand how gender stereotypes exist not only on the pitch stage but also before and after the pitch, such as the choice of business idea and pitch training. In other words, it is necessary to create a more enabling environment for women entrepreneurs, such as customizing the accelerator program so that all business ideas receive relevant support from experts. On a macro level, the study has shown that seemingly gender-equal societies do not practically translate into higher participation of women in entrepreneurship.

For theoretical contributions, the study enhances the discussion that entrepreneurship is gendered; women and men entrepreneurs need to perform certain hegemonic traits to be legitimated as founders. The authors also address various pitching practices that shape pitch performance by including both textual and semiotic data in the study. This study provides social implications on the awareness of gendered norms and the design of entrepreneurial pitching.

Political Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), based on ideas about deliberative democracy, have been criticised for increasing corporate power and democratic deficits. Yet, deliberative ideals are flourishing in the corporate world in the form of dialogues with a broad set of stakeholders and engagement in wider societal issues. Extractive industry areas, with extensive corporate interventions in weak regulatory environments, are particularly vulnerable to asymmetrical power relations when businesses engage with society. This paper aims to illustrate in what way deliberative CSR practices in such contexts risk enhancing corporate power at the expense of community interests.

This paper is based on a retrospective qualitative study of a Canadian oil company, operating in an Albanian oilfield between 2009 and 2016. Through a study of three different deliberative CSR practices – market-based land acquisition, a grievance redress mechanism and dialogue groups – it highlights how these practices in various ways enforced corporate interests and prevented further community mobilisation.

By applying Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony, the analysis highlights how deliberative CSR activities isolated and silenced community demands, moved some community members into the corporate alliance and prevented alternative visions of the area to be articulated. In particular, the close connection between deliberative practices and monetary compensation flows is underlined in this dynamic.

The paper contributes to critical scholarship on political CSR by highlighting in what way deliberative practices, linked to monetary compensation schemes, enforce corporate hegemony by moving community members over to the corporate alliance.

According to the conventional wisdom, trade is not a zero-sum game, but a positive-sum game. By allowing countries to focus on producing the goods that they can produce relatively efficiently, free trade is largely beneficial for everyone involved. Then, why are the world’s two largest economies (i.e. the USA and China) currently engaged in a trade war, which is likely to hurt their own economies? What is the driving force for the trade war between the two economic giants? The purpose of this paper is to offer an explanation of the underlying cause of the US–China trade war.

In an effort to make sense of the trade war between the USA and China, the paper draws the insights from the two international relations theories – i.e. hegemonic stability theory and power transition theory.

As China continues to threaten US hegemony in the world in general and East Asia in particular, the Sino–US competition for hegemony will intensify over time. As a result, the trade war between the two countries may persist longer than many anticipate. Further, even if the trade war between the two superpowers ends soon, a similar type of conflict is likely to occur later as long as the Sino–US hegemonic rivalry continues.

The central thesis of this paper is that “US fear” about its declining hegemony and China’s rapid rise as a challenger of US hegemony is driving a US-launched trade war with China. Since the underlying cause of the trade war between the world’s two largest economies is political (i.e. the Sino–US hegemonic rivalry) rather than economic (e.g. US attempts to improve the trade balance with China by imposing tariffs on Chinese goods), the paper contends that the full understanding of the trade war requires close attention to the importance of power competition between the two superpowers.

The purpose of this paper is to study and specify to what extent Iran will succeed in being a regional hegemon. The paper is devoted to clarification of the constitutive elements for regional hegemony. These elements will be related to an actor’s perception of its role and regional perception, and how these hegemons exert power, do these work for the public good in the region (provision) and how this regional power projects power and exerts power to influence others’ preferences and values without reference to violence (projection). For the Middle East, Iran emerged as a key player in most regional conflicts and it tried to increase its sphere of influence as a regional hegemon. Therefore the question here would be: To what extend could Iran succeed in being a regional hegemon and what are the circumstances that could enhance or constrain this Iranian ambition? So the aim of the paper is to look at three dimensions in general and see whether Iran makes a plausible candidate for regional hegemony. The paper outlines the essential traits of a regional hegemon, and the main elements that constitute a regional hegemony such as perception, provision and projection, and then analyze how Iran follows those elements by analyzing internal perceptions of the Iranian elite about Iranian regional role, regional acceptance, provision of public good, projection and finally impact of the relation with external great powers. Through analyzing its regional strategy in Syria and Iraq since 2003, the year of invasion of Iraq, since ever a political vacuum was created, that enabled Iran to extend its regional influence, after the fall of its historical regional rival, Saddam Hussein baathi regime.

The study adopts an analytical framework of analyzing a regional hegemony strategy which is approached by Miriam Prys in her study “Hegemony, domination, detachment: differences in regional powerhood” to study and analyze Iran’s regional behavior as one of regional power that is seeking regional hegemony. This analytical framework is one of the most significant analytical tools that interests in the study of the behavior of regional power and identify the constitutive dimensions for regional hegemony such as self-perception, regional perception, provision and power projection.

The study concludes that there are obstacles completely in front of achieving the Iranian quest to regional hegemony over the Middle East. These are the continuing US involvement in the Middle East and the consequent tense relationship between Iran and the USA. It is most unlikely that Iran will be hegemonic state over the Middle East as long as there are refusal and resistance from other regional states for Iranian regional role; as each of regional powers has tools to contain the influence of the other. The Iranian regional behavior that is sectarianism-based, whether to protect Shiite shrines and holy places or to protect Shiites in the region, such policies deepen the ideological and sectarian conflicts. It also has not provided an attractive cultural model for the peoples of the region.

This paper enhances the deep analysis of the Middle East dynamics through the prospective of regional power. Also, the paper focuses on the analysis of the relation between great power and aspiring regional power and the impact on its strategies.

This study enhances the understanding of how Iranian decision-makers perceive their regional Iranian and the threats. Moreover, the tools that Iran uses its hard power and ideational one to create regional followers and change its allies’ normative and value systems to come in line with its national interests. Moreover, the study tries to measure the actual Iranian influence, its weakness and strength so that the Arab states and the West could behave in a fruitful way.

In the final analysis, the paper offers an insight into the regional behavior and the importance of external power in regional dynamics and to what extent the regional hegemon is applicable to Iran.

To realise the shared development of the digital economy, people need to transcend the capital logic and advocate the logic of cooperative development, i.e. “co-construction, benefit-sharing and co-governance”. This study aims to discuss the aforementioned statement.

Platform economy is a new economic form produced by the transformation of the social production patterns in the era of digital capitalism. In the neo-imperialist stage, a new stage of capitalist development, capital logic promotes the global expansion of the platform economy and influences its development process, organisational form, contradictions and dilemmas and internal transcendence. Having the spatiotemporal chain of capital circulation repaired, the globalisation of the platform economy is reshaping how the means of production are combined with labour, affecting the local changes in the general relations of production and “international relations of production”.

In the accumulation of digital capitalism, the social contradictions and fundamental contradictions in the capitalist world have been further intensified, making exploitation, income distribution gap, monopoly and other problems increasingly severe. The imbalance and inequality in the global development of the digital economy are increasingly prominent.

Regarding the global governance of the digital economy, China, as a major responsible country, will strive to encourage all countries to co-build a community with a shared future in cyberspace. In the new international development pattern of digital economy globalisation, China must take effective measures to actively safeguard its national security and development interests to meet specific challenges.