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This chapter argues that the ‘Friday afternoon’ approach to art education needs to change; the conversation needs to be more about art and the impact that it has had and continues to have. Children need to be surrounded by art to a greater extent and should be seen as multi-dimensional learners who can create art, acknowledging that they do not all think, and learn, the same ways. It is their unique characteristics that will help shape them as artists. This chapter uses the works of ‘The Masters’ to support the view that there is no right or wrong when creating art and that supporting students to understand that great art only stands out because it is different and does not follow preordained rules or styles is important. Visual Arts teaching should encourage personal judgment, subjectivity, and provide students the opportunities to find their unique voice and to have the confidence to use it.

The United States military, like most militaries, has traditionally been a male-dominated organisation. Contemporary military historians argue that wars and the militaries that fight them are “an entirely masculine activity” (Keegan, 1993, p. 76) and “[b]efore it was anything else, war was an assertion of masculinity. When everything else is said and done, an assertion of masculinity is what it remains” (Van Creveld, 2001, p. 161). Because the military's “core activity” is combat (…), a task viewed primarily in masculine terms because it has generally been defined as “men's work”, a “deeply entrenched cult of masculinity pervades US military culture” (Dunivin, 1997, p. 2). Language has codified the long history of the masculine warrior paradigm. Van Creveld notes that the Old Testament utilises the same term for “adult man” and “warrior” while medieval Germans used “becoming a man” and “carrying a sword” interchangeably (Van Creveld, 2001, p. 164). James Webb, former Secretary of the Navy in the late 1980s, called combat the “quintessentially male obligation in any society” (Webb, 1997, p. 4). If societies have obligated men to combat, they have rewarded them by connecting combat to the achievement of manhood. Men bestow manhood on one another: men are made, not born (Goldstein, 2001). According to Kimmel (2000a, p. 214), “What men need is men's approval (…) we test ourselves, perform heroic feats, take enormous risks, all because we want other men to grant us our manhood.”

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between the level of subsidiaries’ internal and external relational embeddedness and the degree of subsidiaries’ knowledge transfer. More specifically, the aim is to explore dual embeddedness of subsidiaries involved in the knowledge transfer process within multinational corporations’ (MNCs) network.

The authors empirically analyse 165 European subsidiaries to demonstrate the crucial role of dual relational embeddedness in the transfer of knowledge within MNCs. Data were collected via a close-ended questionnaire and processed through an ordinary least squares regression model.

Results show that internal embeddedness directly and positively influences the degree of subsidiaries’ knowledge transfer, whereas external embeddedness does not. Notwithstanding, a higher level of both types of embeddedness – known as dual embeddedness – generates multiplicative and positive effects on the degree of subsidiaries’ knowledge transfer.

Best practices and relevant knowledge follow a reverse transfer of knowledge from the subsidiaries to the internal MNC network that is facilitated by the relational embeddedness of subsidiaries. This has resulted in developing a dual embeddedness, which introduces new routines and scripts, as well as more relational links.

The research emphasises the relevance of the knowledge transfer process in multiple directions, evoking the central role of dual-embedded subsidiaries.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of age, work experience and gender on individuals’ propensity (inclination or readiness) to trust others.

The authors gathered literature arguments and developed a basic theoretical model explored through an empirical study. The study uses a sample of 324 retail business owners/operators in the United Arab Emirates. The authors developed and tested three main hypotheses.

Age has a significant positive impact on the propensity to trust. Work experience has a similar effect, but to a lesser degree. Females are generally less predisposed to trust. However, the impact of age on trust was significant for both males and females.

This study focuses on a small sample of individuals in a single country. A larger multi-context study would be beneficial in verifying the above findings. Also, the concept of trust used in this study is general and focuses mainly on general likelihood/aspirations to trust others. Future research could examine the relationship of age to different aspects of trust and in different circumstances.

The findings of this study have several practical benefits. They draw the attention of human resource management practitioners and policy makers to the importance of age, work experience and gender in shaping trust relationships in both societal and business contexts.

The impact of age (and aging) work and society in general is a growing concern. Despite the number of studies examining trust and the process of trust formation, the relationships between age, gender and trust have been largely overlooked in previous research. This study attempts to address this gap and provides useful evidence likely to inspire further/future research on this issue.

The role of HQ in the contemporary MNC has recently received a good deal of research attention. This article argues that the contemporary MNC requires an organizational model that can embrace different perspectives of the HQ role. The same HQ must at times hierarchically lead the firm and at other times assume a more passive, facilitative role that allows direct interaction and decision making among the subunits to coordinate interdependency within the firm. To achieve this integration, the article proposes a contingency model that specifies when the HQ should assume a hierarchical role and when it should assume a facilitative role.

The purpose of this study is to review the levels of open government data (OGD) among various countries that are not consistent with the development levels of those countries. This study evaluates the associativity between OGD Index (OGD) and the characteristics of those countries as well as to compare the degree of OGD among countries. Accordingly, an advanced discussion to explore how a country’s characteristics affect how that country’s government opens data was presented.

The stakeholder relationships of OGD is analysed with the characteristics of a country. The usage data are compared with the data availability according to nine indicators. These data collected from the statistics and OGDI websites are grouped for comparative statistical analyses based on basic descriptive statistics, one-way analysis of variance and a regression model with variance inflation faction.

The results 1) revealed the reasons some countries have high-ranking indexes and 2) verified the high index values of countries in terms of their degrees of development. This study, thus, attempted to derive a balanced appraisal of national development and OGD.

The study sample is limited only to countries 1) which open the statistical data; and 2) are of uneven population density and development degree. The OGDI is limited to expert evaluation. The score might be vary to experts and users with diverse countries at different evaluation period. The limitations can be attributed to the differences between OGDI and real open levels. These differences might influence the reliability and validity.

Government departments with OGD policies provide raw data in various formats and with application interfaces for user access. This study, thus, attempts to derive a balanced appraisal of national development and OGD. The factors that evaluate which types of countries open the level of data are explored.

This study establishes stakeholder relationships of OGD and extends to analyse the characteristics of a country and OGD that affect the government data open level. The relationships are evaluated through the OGDI with design score scheme. The measurement results indicated that a country possesses high relation to open data with high DI and nature resource.

We address the problem of selecting the common factors that are relevant for forecasting macroeconomic variables. In economic forecasting using diffusion indexes, the factors are ordered, according to their importance, in terms of relative variability, and are the same for each variable to predict, that is, the process of selecting the factors is not supervised by the predictand. We propose a simple and operational supervised method, based on selecting the factors on the basis of their significance in the regression of the predictand on the predictors. Given a potentially large number of predictors, we consider linear transformations obtained by principal components analysis. The orthogonality of the components implies that the standard t-statistics for the inclusion of a particular component are independent, and thus applying a selection procedure that takes into account the multiplicity of the hypotheses tests is both correct and computationally feasible. We focus on three main multiple testing procedures: Holm's sequential method, controlling the familywise error rate, the Benjamini–Hochberg method, controlling the false discovery rate, and a procedure for incorporating prior information on the ordering of the components, based on weighting the p-values according to the eigenvalues associated to the components. We compare the empirical performances of these methods with the classical diffusion index (DI) approach proposed by Stock and Watson, conducting a pseudo-real-time forecasting exercise, assessing the predictions of eight macroeconomic variables using factors extracted from an U.S. dataset consisting of 121 quarterly time series. The overall conclusion is that nature is tricky, but essentially benign: the information that is relevant for prediction is effectively condensed by the first few factors. However, variable selection, leading to exclude some of the low-order principal components, can lead to a sizable improvement in forecasting in specific cases. Only in one instance, real personal income, we were able to detect a significant contribution from high-order components.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

The chapter examines how distance, integration mechanisms, and atmosphere influence the level of organizing costs and subsidiary initiatives in headquarter–subsidiary relationships. Survey data were collected at the subsidiary level in one major Norwegian multinational company. Empirical analyses were based on regression and partial correlation analyses. Organizing costs are driven by distance to headquarters as well as the integration mechanisms and the atmosphere that exists in subsidiary–headquarter relationships. Another important insight gained by this study is that integration mechanisms influence subsidiary initiatives.

We examine how subsidiaries of multinational companies communicate with headquarters about business opportunities they perceive in their local environment. Our aim is to provide in-depth insights into how communication is used to attract the attention of headquarters.

We study four communication processes of opportunities recognised by subsidiary managers in four different units within the same multinational corporation.

We find that communication is influenced by the subsidiaries’ perception of their relationship with headquarters. Importantly, we find that subsidiaries in emerging countries show different communication patterns than those in advanced markets. Our results further point out that multinationals from advanced countries face the challenge to respond to the increased salience of opportunities from emerging economies, while at the same time still working within existing communication patterns and structures that are not adapted to this new situation.

Our study presents communication processes within multinationals beyond the frequency of communication, including a variety of aspects of communication. Doing so, we are able to point out that open communication is not achieved with all subsidiaries, and what is worse, seems most of all to be challenged for subsidiaries in emerging markets, risking promising business opportunities in these markets.