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The paper's aim is to introduce the interactive acculturation model (IAM) of Bourhis et al. to predict how disconcordance in acculturation orientations between host community and immigrant workers relates to the quality of intergroup work‐relations.

The sample consisted of 141 host community (Dutch) and 41 non‐western immigrant workers of a postal service company who filled out a questionnaire. Methods of analyses include analysis of variance and multiple regression.

In line with the IAM, results showed that a higher disconcordance in preferred acculturation orientations between host community and immigrant workers related to a poorer quality of intergroup work‐relations. However, intergroup contact moderated this relationship differently for host community and immigrant workers.

Data are cross‐sectional and collected in one organization. Future studies should replicate the findings to other organizational contexts, cultural groups, and collect longitudinal data to determine causal effects.

Organizations should monitor disconcordance in acculturation orientations amongst host community and immigrant workers. A multicultural culture in organizations may reduce disconcordance in acculturation orientations between host community and immigrant workers.

The paper helps to explain the mixed findings in cultural diversity research so far, by demonstrating that disconcordance in acculturation orientations relates negatively to intergroup work‐relations in a multicultural workplace.

Tribeca is a predominantly wealthy, white neighborhood in New York City and is a microcosm of the service-and-information-based economy that characterizes many communities in global cities today. Tribeca residents are mostly affluent and work in high-end, service-oriented professions, consuming low-end personal services produced locally. Many of the people who provide these personal services in Tribeca are foreign-born. This chapter explores the nature of intergroup contact between native residents and immigrant service workers to understand how they navigate social boundaries of race/ethnicity, nation-of-origin, occupation, and social class.

This chapter is based on six years of ethnographic data collection and participant observation, in addition to interviews with 66 informants, including both immigrant service workers and Tribeca residents.

This research highlights the importance of local contextual factors in shaping how people perceive one another and interact. Although in Tribeca this intergroup contact fails to alter boundaries of race, class, and nation-of-origin, residents and immigrants still have meaningful interpersonal contact, which is the result of bridging, or overlooking, existing social boundaries.

The results of this research challenge the assumption that relations between natives and immigrants in stratified settings are characterized by resentment or hostility. Instead, contextual factors in Tribeca shape intergroup perceptions and contact in a way that allows for positive interpersonal, albeit largely superficial, relationships to take root.

This chapter describes a theory of intergroup leadership. Research on reducing prejudice and intergroup conflict identifies a number of conditions, such as empathy, shared goals, crossed categorization, recategorization, and intergroup contact, which can be beneficial. It also identifies social identity threat as a stumbling block – processes intended to reduce conflict often threaten people’s sense of having a unique and distinctive social identity and thus provoke a defensive reaction that sustains conflict. But social psychology says little about the role of group leadership in conflict resolution.

I summarize what we know from social psychology about conditions that attenuate intergroup conflict; then focus on social identity and influence processes to present a new theory of leadership across conflicting groups.

Prejudice and intergroup conflict reduction rests on effective messaging and influence, which is often a matter of intergroup leadership where a leader must bridge and integrate warring factions within a superordinate entity. The challenge of intergroup leadership is to construct an intergroup relational identity that focuses on collaboration and avoids identity threat. I describe a model of intergroup leadership and discuss strategies, such as identity rhetoric, boundary spanning and leadership coalition-building, that such leadership should adopt to effectively reconstruct social identity to reduce conflict and prejudice between groups.

This is a development and extension of a more narrowly focused theory of intergroup leadership in organizational contexts. It will be of value to social psychology, the behavioral and social sciences, and those seeking to reduce prejudice and intergroup conflict through leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and present a conceptual model of expatriate–host country national (HCN) interaction that explains how organizations can help increase cooperation between expatriates and HCNs by facilitating interaction between expatriates and HCNs.

The authors draw upon intergroup contact theory to develop a process model which describes the processes critical to “the effectiveness of the expatriate–HCN relationship,” from both the expatriate and HCN perspectives.

HCN–expatriate interactions are critical to the success of both expatriates and HCNs, but such interactions should not be left to chance – instead, organizations should intervene and facilitate conditions that foster such interactions, which can lead to better understanding and appreciation of each other. This would ensure that both expatriates and HCNs have a better understanding of the critical role played by the other party, and thus be willing to offer relevant and necessary support at the right time.

Prior research reveals that most expatriate–HCN interactions are left to the individuals themselves and are thus subject to stereotypes, misperceptions and even unfulfilled expectations. By intervening in this process, and providing relevant information about each other to both parties, organizations can facilitate higher quality interactions, help reduce or remove stereotypes and increase the chances that both parties receive required and relevant information on a timely basis from each other.

The authors specifically discuss how interpersonal expatriate–HCN interactions allow the two parties to become acquainted with each other, when the effects of such interactions can be strengthened, and what the resultant effects are in terms of expatriate–HCN relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of constructive intercultural contact. This concept refers to intercultural contact in which majority as well as minority participants are intercultural effective, i.e. can perceive themselves as comfortable and successful.

This study is based on exploration and review of intergroup, contact, acculturation and organization literature.

Five input elements of constructive intercultural contact are distinguished: responsibility, deliberate choice to postpone judgment, acknowledging the relative relevance of cultural differences, perspective taking and respect. What participants have to do to make constructive intercultural contact in organizations not only possible between colleagues, but also in hierarchical relationships is elaborated by reflection on the interrelation between majority/minority and manager/employee positions in constructive intercultural contact.

This paper contributes to diversity management literature by introducing a new concept which, focusing on the interaction level, explains how participants can make intercultural contact into a comfortable and successful experience for both. Other contributions are the differentiation between majority and minority actors and the elaboration of the complexity of intercultural employee/manager contacts.

While researchers have argued that multicultural marketplaces are conceptually different from other types of marketplaces, the marketing literature has only recently begun to develop multicultural perspective studies, and very little research has been done to examine intergroup complexities in consumption contexts (Demangeot et al., 2015). The purpose of this study is to fill this research gap by developing and empirically testing a research model to examine the effects of socio-political constructs and intergroup-based emotional variables on consumer decisions to consume cross-ethnic products.

A questionnaire designed to assess the effects of socio-political constructs and intergroup-based emotional variables on consumer decisions to consume cross-ethnic products was developed and administered to 294 students at a Midwestern US university. The data were analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) techniques.

Results indicate that all path coefficients are significant. Social dominance, intergroup anxiety and intergroup experience were found to be important predictors of intergroup tolerance and, importantly, intergroup tolerance was found to significantly affect consumer attitude toward cross-ethnic products.

In terms of limitations and future research implications, this research suffers from inherent limitations associated with self-reported survey research in a limited geographic region. Accordingly, study respondents may not be representative of consumers across the nation or the world, the respondents may not have understood the questions in the intended manner, and reported intentions may not reflect actual behaviour. This study was conducted among college students, but other target segments may have different intergroup experiences and perceptions of ethnic products.

Findings from this research suggest that firms offering ethnic products can increase crossover consumption appeal by implementing marketing communication programmes that integrate cultural forums and event tactics to promote positive intergroup experiences and tolerance among their multicultural customers.

Regarding policy implications, public policymakers and social thinkers may use the findings of this study as a prism to better explicate intercultural dealings among multicultural consumers. The contention of this study about public policy implications is supported by Neal et al.’s (2013) perspectives on how consumption situations can serve as a lens for explicating intergroup emotions in multicultural marketplaces.

This is one of only a few studies in marketing to assess the effects of socio-political constructs in a consumption context. This is the first known study to underscore the importance of intranational ethnic differences and assess the effects of socio-political and intergroup-based emotional variables on attitude to consume ethnic products, specifically.

The transgender community faces prejudice and stigma and is one of the most ostracised groups in society. One of the ways to reduce prejudice is through intergroup contact. This may be achieved through direct or indirect contact. The purpose of this paper is to compare the impact of direct and indirect contact on reducing transphobia.

Direct contact was achieved through a transgender speaker panel and indirect contact involved a video presentation. In total, 159 students enroled in undergraduate courses at a prominent university in India were enlisted for this study. Perceptions regarding transgenders were measured using the genderism and transphobia scale. Perceptions were measured at three different time points – before the contact, immediately after the contact and one month post contact.

Results indicate that both direct and indirect contact cause a significant immediate decrease in transphobia at the post intervention stage. However, only direct contact caused significant reduction at the follow-up stage (one month after the intervention). Direct contact also effected a greater reduction in transphobia than indirect contact.

This study extends previous research that shows that speaker panels involving sexual minority speakers can result in reducing stigma (e.g. Croteau and Kusek, 1992). The present study shows that such speaker panels can also be useful for reducing stigma against transgender individuals. Another important outcome of this study is the relative effectiveness of direct contact in reducing transphobia compared to indirect contact. Direct contact resulted in greater reduction in transphobia both at the post-test and follow-up stages compared to indirect contact.

The results of this study may benefit HR practitioners and policy makers in designing workplace initiatives and policies in creating an inclusive workplace. This study shows that meaningful interaction with transgenders would be a key step in reducing stigmatisation. Since direct contact is rarely expensive or time consuming, it can be a valuable tool to improve the integration of transgender individuals within society. Therefore, students and employees may be encouraged to interact with transgender individuals through panel discussions and workshops. Indirect contact may be used as a preliminary intervention in certain cases where direct contact may be difficult to organise.

The stigma faced by transgender individuals has a significant negative impact on their quality of life (Grant et al., 2014; Reisner and Juntunen, 2015). It is, therefore, necessary to recognise and reduce prejudice against transgenders at both the college and school levels as well as in work organisations. Educators and managers have a significant role to play in this societal change. This study shows that stigma reduction can be achieved in a fairly simple way through contact theory.

This study is one of the first to investigate Indian students’ perceptions of transgenders. It improves on earlier studies using similar interventions in two main ways. First, this study includes a follow-up assessment, which was not performed in most studies. Second, random assignment of participants to one of two conditions improves the reliability of the findings.

In this chapter, we consider the fundamental importance of social identity both in terms of how people think about others and for personal well-being. The chapter reviews how social categorization and social identity impact people's responses to others and, drawing on our own work on the Common Ingroup Identity Model, examines how identity processes can be shaped to improve intergroup relations. This model describes how factors that alter the perceptions of the memberships of separate groups to conceive of themselves as members of a single, more inclusive, superordinate group can reduce intergroup bias. The present chapter focuses on four developments in the model: (1) recognizing that multiple social identities can be activated simultaneously (e.g., a dual identity); (2) acknowledging that the meaning of different identities varies for different groups (e.g., racial or ethnic groups); (3) describing how the impact of different social identities can vary as a function of social context and social and personal values; and (4) outlining how these processes can influence not only intergroup attitudes but also personal well-being, interms of both mental and physical health.

The purpose of this paper is to review psychology‐based programmes, which were developed to bring together children and young people from Protestant and Catholic backgrounds following the outbreak of the conflict in Northern Ireland.

The authors focused on reporting findings from early research papers and reviews as well as more recent studies. They examined the role of holiday schemes and then the development and evaluation of inter‐school contact schemes.

The findings highlight the strengths and weaknesses associated with peace programmes for youth in Northern Ireland. The paper argues the importance of these programmes for conflicted societies, provided that they are based on current research.

The authors believe the work from Northern Ireland reviewed here has important implications for activities aimed at improving intergroup relations in other societies. These findings will be of interest to researchers, policy makers and practitioners alike.

Purpose – This chapter contributes to comparative biopolitics and reviews primatological literature, especially about our nearest relatives, the Great Apes.

Design/methodology/approach – Biopolitics in this chapter means evolutionarily informed political science, with emphasis on power relations. I review the literature on intrasexual and intersexual dominance interactions among individuals and competitive and/or agonistic interactions among groups in the Great Apes (Hominidae, formerly Pongidae): orangutan (Pongo with two species and three subspecies), gorilla (Gorilla with four subspecies), bonobo (Pan paniscus), and common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes with four subspecies). In the final section I present some (speculative) thoughts on Pan prior or the modern human ancestor.

Findings – Not only Man is a political animal.

Originality/value – Impartial, objective, and as complete as possible review of the literature for the students of (comparative) politics, ethology, and psychology.