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The housing/real estate sector is one of the most important sectors in any country. However, existing marketing literature on the home buying behavior and the decision-making process is still in the early stage of development. The purpose of this study is to examine the home buying behavior from the consumers’ perspective in a high-context culture, namely, Kyrgyzstan and its managerial and/or public policy implications to other countries which are at a similar level of socio-economic development as Kyrgyzstan.

Using a questionnaire, data for the study (n = 300) is collected from households in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Personal interviews were used to collect data from the four administrative regions of Bishkek.

Results of this study show that the physical, environmental and financial dimensions of the homes influenced consumers’ home buying intentions. A few statistically significant differences in terms of preferences for the proximity of the property to schools and shopping districts, having public sewer and water connections, and safety characteristics of the neighborhood were found between the first-time homebuyers and the repeat homebuyers.

The most important limitation of the study is the use of convenience sampling. Although the sample size is reasonably large, the selection of the responses was done based on using convenience and connections. Representativeness of the results may be limited.

Along with the physical, environmental and financial dimensions of the homes, home buying is a high-involvement decision; it is not as much of an emotional purchase but rather a main residence and a good long-term value for Kyrgyz households. Both marketing and social stimuli did not have any statistically significant effect on purchase intentions. Therefore, housing and real estate developers should focus on understanding how their offering meets individual customers’ tangible and intangible expectations and assist them in their highly involved decision-making process.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to conduct an empirical study to analyze the home buying decisions of Kyrgyz households. This study contributes to marketing literature by filling the existing gaps in understanding various facets of the high-context consumers’ home buying decision-making.

This study aims to reveal Türkiye's place on the global cultural map through eight dimensions compared to other countries with the help of these two subresearch questions: “Where is Türkiye positioned on Meyer's map, and how is the positioning when country groups are taken into account?”.

This issue is considered necessary regarding the country’s business culture, which is an emerging market. For this, 17 senior executives engaged in international trade activities were selected as cases. The eight dimensions of Erin Meyer’s culture map were analyzed by considering the interview data obtained from the executives.

As a result of the analysis, it was determined that Türkiye is in a position that can be called an east–west synthesis in terms of culture, even though it is geographically evaluated within MENA and that it is located close to the middle of the continuum axis on the basis of almost all dimensions. However, the three dimensions out of eight – communication, deciding and trusting – are relatively far from the middle. The authors believe that this situation is closely related to Türkiye’s unique historical characteristics.

The placement of the nations on a cultural map may be useful for practitioners. By looking at the relative position on this map and taking it into consideration while building connections and negotiating, for instance, businesses and policymakers who wish to enhance their ties with Türkiye can be aware of the distinctions between their own countries and Türkiye. The inhibiting nature of qualitative research prevents generalization; however, much bigger data set may be used for a comparable approach. Further research can be done to solve this issue because the cases under examination do not permit comparisons specific to the American continent.

The theoretical contribution of this study lies in its focused revelation of Turkey’s cultural positioning within the context of emerging markets. Positioning the countries on the cultural map can provide some convenience to the practitioners. Türkiye is a crucial clustering center when global production is considered. This opens the country to contact other cultures and enables intercultural transfer and learning.

This study proposes “genuine small talk” in hospitality settings, particularly in coffee shops and its impact on enhancing guest experiences. This study aims to delineate how genuine small talk, characterized by sincerity, mutual respect, truthfulness and empathy, differs from traditional conversational engagements and influences service outcomes.

The study adopts a case research approach, focusing on the global coffee shop industry, particularly in high-context cultural settings. Using an abductive research paradigm, it intertwines theoretical concepts with empirical data gathered from face-to-face interviews with coffee shop visitors and managers. Data analysis involved qualitative coding techniques to synthesize and interpret findings related to genuine small talk.

Genuine small talk in hospitality, marked by sincerity, mutual respect, truthfulness and empathy, significantly enhances customer experiences. It transforms service encounters, turning negative experiences into positive ones and fostering customer loyalty. The study finds that genuine small talk is a strategic tool for emotional resonance and repeat patronage, yet its effectiveness depends on the staff’s ability to discern and adapt to customer moods and preferences.

This study highlights that genuine interpersonal interactions are key to enhancing customer experiences in hospitality. These genuine exchanges, characterized by sincerity, mutual respect, truthfulness and empathy, not only improve the immediate service encounter but also foster long-term customer loyalty. By transforming transactional interactions into meaningful connections, genuine small talk serves as a strategic tool in the hospitality industry, potentially reshaping service dynamics and elevating the perceived value of customer service. This research underscores the importance of staff training in emotional intelligence and adaptability to customer preferences, crucial for implementing genuine small talk effectively.

This research contributes to the hospitality literature by elucidating the nuanced role of genuine small talk in service encounters. It extends existing discourses of service interactions by highlighting the potential of genuine small talk in fostering connections and enhancing guest experiences.

Given resource constraints such as time and staffing, hotels cannot respond to all negative online reviews (NORs). Therefore, this study investigates (1) what types of NORs hotels should prioritize responding; and (2) what response strategies are more effective in handling different types of NORs to minimize the negative ramifications.

Four experiments in the context of hospitability were used to test the hypotheses.

Our findings show that NORs with implicit conclusions (e.g. “I do not believe that is a good choice, you know what I mean.”) are more dissuasive than NORs with explicit ones (e.g. “Do not buy it.”) because the former NORs are perceived as more objective than the latter NORs. More importantly, our results show that firms do not need to respond to explicit NORs. When responding to implicit NORs, firms should prioritize those related to service failures caused by external (e.g. weather, technological misfunction) rather than internal (e.g. poor management, employee skills) factors.

Our studies focus on the language styles of Chinese NORs, and future research should investigate how language styles influence dissuasion in other languages.

Our results show that NORs with implicit conclusions negatively impact consumer attitude and thus hurt performance more significantly than those with explicit conclusions. Therefore, firms should allocate limited staffing and resources to NORs with implicit conclusions. When responding to implicit NORs, firms should select NORs that can be attributed to external factors.

Our findings shed light on the importance of the language styles of NORs and provide marketers with insights into how to handle NORs. Our results reveal that consumers perceive higher objectivity of NORs when these reviews are implicit than when they are explicit. Furthermore, this study contributes to the online review literature by suggesting that firms should tailor their response strategies for NORs based on the reviewers’ language styles.

This paper first aims to examine associations between factors involved in business-to-business complaints management and results (satisfaction and loyalty) and analyses three types of distributors based on their cultural profile (domestic, low context and high context). Second, the paper investigates whether the identified associations remain stable over time.

Data from a sample of distributors for a manufacturing company were gathered during two periods of time. A factorial analysis of correspondences and a cluster analysis were carried out to visually represent the associations among clients, complaints and results in the associations among clients, complaints and results. The stability over time of these relationships was also analysed by calculating the correlations between the Euclidean distances on the two maps (one per year) and their mobility ratio.

The authors found significant evidence that clients from different cultures are associated with varying profiles of complaint and different result types and that certain associations remain stable over time.

While many studies have analysed complaint behaviour in business-to-consumer contexts, there is a lack of research from an international business-business relations point of view, leaving questions virtually unexplored. Second, the last phases of supply chain management, specifically complaints management, have been undeveloped, limiting the cultural factor to the general scope of negotiation. In this vein, this paper compares different complaint profiles and results, comparing culturally different customers/distributors. Third, research has mostly referred to a single period, while this paper investigates two different periods of time for the same company (and their distributors) to analyse the relevance of the stability (or not) over time of the associations identified.

Cyberbullying is a globally pervasive problem and not novel in academia. Previous studies mainly focussed on the features, consequences and technological management of cyberbullying. However, most of the studies took cyberbullying examples in the West, and some issues still need to be addressed in the Chinese context. Thus, this study investigates how participants use cyberbullying words and why they use them in that particular way in China.

This study uses content analysis to summarise the typical features of cyberbullying words, revealing a positive relationship between cyberbullying words and sentimental expressions. This paper also uses the questionnaire (N = 705) to explore the prevalence of cyberbullying among Chinese Internet users and to compare the gender differences in the cognition of cyberbullying words and involvement in cyberbullying, in line with the social cognitive theory.

This study stated that people prefer repetitively using offensive words to achieve cyberbullying goals. Interestingly, this study does not find obvious gender differences in cyberbullying roles and cyberbullying language use. However, it explained the relationship between cognition and the use of cyberbullying words from a gender perspective.

Theoretically, this study expands cyberbullying studies into a new cultural environment, pointing to a novel term, “imbalanced relation,” for exploring cyberbullying behaviours. This study highlights the significance of technology and education in detecting and preventing cyberbullying, suggesting that educators and social media platforms can directly predict and prevent cyberbullying through textual perspectives and individuals' cognition of cyberbullying.

This study aims to examine cyberbullying linguistic and emotional features and individual differences in cyberbullying behaviour in a high-context culture like China. Its values include comparing the differences between cyberbullying in China and cyberbullying in the West from the linguistic and cultural directions and reconsidering the “power imbalance” feature of cyberbullying.

This article reviews the practice of horenso (a mnemonic for hokoku/reporting, renraku/informing and sodan/consulting) – an under-documented Japanese communication methodology – at a Japanese-owned subsidiary in Thailand. It draws on a number of cultural theories to explore how horenso was influenced by the non-biculturality of individuals at a multinational corporation.

This article draws on first-hand interviews with staff of varying responsibilities at a multinational electronic components manufacturer, Spin-eTech (a pseudonym) to understand how horenso has been utilized and perceived at this Japanese-owned subsidiary in Thailand differently from its original form and traditional use at its headquarters in Japan. This was a targeted case that captured the real time communication difficulties at the workplace.

The themes of horenso's rationale, motivation, style of communication, use for problem solving, information reporting, relation to superiority and culture of communication emerged as prominent differences for how horenso was practiced at the Thai subsidiary.

Using the emic perspective of cultural understanding, insights are offered into the impact of non-biculturality within the Asia Pacific region on the practice of horenso to extant knowledge on the under-explored “eastern vs eastern” cultural differences.

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has increased food delivery service demand, which generates massive amounts of solid waste, specifically plastic material. Therefore, this study aims to examine the determinants of consumers' intention to reuse food delivery containers (ITR) using the extended theory of planned behavior (TPB). Moral obligation was included as an antecedent, while behavioral expectation (BE) ahead of behavioral intention was an immediate predictor of consumers' pro-environmental behaviors.

The hypotheses were tested on 348 food delivery service users in Malaysia and analyzed using the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).

The findings indicated that consumers' ITR is directly influenced by perceived behavioral control and attitude. Perceived behavioral control and attitude had a positive partial indirect effect on ITR through BE. Meanwhile, subjective norms and moral obligation had a positive full indirect effect on ITR through BE.

The findings can be directly applied to practical situations of food delivery companies and environmental protection organizations managing solid waste among food delivery services.

Understanding consumers' ITR could promote practical environmental sustainability. Practically, the study provides insights to the food delivery service industry, policymakers and relevant stakeholders to encourage consumer behavior change by reusing food delivery containers in line with Sustainable Development Goal 12.

The study enhances the existing literature by extending TPB with two psychological variables: moral obligation (independent variable) and BE (mediating variable). To the best of the authors' knowledge, this study is the first attempt to empirically investigate BE in consumers' pro-environmental behavioral intention in a high-context culture and developing economy. This study could benefit food and beverage merchants, food delivery companies, governments, non-governmental organizations and pro-environmental behavior researchers in this industry.

The purpose of this paper is to explore international market development for mature products and practices used in a novel business context.

Taking a qualitative approach, the case study method was chosen to investigate how firms develop markets in relation to a new international business context. Critical international decisions are analysed using a managerial perspective.

The success of international ventures depends on managerial learning and effectiveness. In this paper, the authors argue that decisions about international market development can add significantly to the understanding of how business firms enter and develop markets in novel business contexts. Two case studies show different approaches for meeting challenges in distant markets. Four propositions are developed.

A theoretical contribution of this study is the importance of factors that explain international market development decisions in novel business contexts. The balance between incomplete knowledge and making resource commitments is of central concern to international managers. Some of this is tacit knowledge that a firm achieves and learns during the process of market development and other knowledge can only become available after an actual market entry. A second theoretical contribution of this study is the significance of contextual market knowledge in a novel business context.