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Brand transgressions, characterized by service failure, are a frequent theme for marketing scholars. Their impact on satisfaction, trust and brand loyalty is of high interest. However, in assessing the influence of those events on third-party consumers, the literature is still lacking. The purpose of this paper is to explore how social distance explains the reactions of close and distant third-party consumers toward other consumers during a brand transgression event. Anger is analyzed as a driver of this process.

Two experiments were conducted. Both studies presented a 3 (social distance: victim vs close third party vs distant third party) by 2 (severity: low vs high) between-subjects design. Respondents were asked to read a transgression scenario in a mobile phone service (study 1) and in a restaurant (study 2) and then completed scales that measured their affective reactions and evaluations of the relationship – satisfaction, trust, and loyalty intention – with the transgressing brand.

The results showed that transgression severity intensifies the effect of the brand transgression on consumer’s anger. Victims and close third parties demonstrated higher levels of anger compared to distant third-party consumers. In the case of severe transgressions, an experience of anger contagion between victims and close third-party consumers was responsible for the negative effect on the relationship evaluation of the transgressing brand compared to distant third-party consumers.

This study extends previous research about how social distance influences consumer-brand relationships and demonstrates the mediating role played by affective anger contagion.

Gender diversity in higher management levels of companies is becoming an increasingly relevant topic – organizations in general are realizing the necessity of having a higher proportion of women in higher level management positions. This can only be achieved through actively promoting women in business. Various HR instruments are available to support a gender diversity strategy, one of which is mentoring. This chapter ascertains in what way mentoring is a sustainable instrument for the promotion of women in business specifically in Germany, by analyzing mentoring programs in various German companies from the points of view of both mentees and mentors. With the help of an online survey among female mentors and mentees and the theory given in the literature, the organizational aspects as well as the implementation of such programs are assessed with the aim of recognizing potential areas of improvement for companies in Germany in future. Based on this analysis, it can be concluded that mentoring for women is organized quite successfully in Germany, but that nevertheless certain areas of consideration exist in view of the general organization and the communication and marketing of the program.

The paper aims to contribute to the discussion about how SIEs articulate narratives as cognitive efforts to expand, restrict or adapt their repertoire of identities in highly regulated environments.

Drawing from a social constructivist positioning, the paper explores situated social and relational practices using a qualitative framework that relied on primary data gathering through semi‐structured interviews. Qatar is a context of particular interest for exploring identity narratives of SIEs given the highly regulated environment and the large numbers of non‐nationals within the overall workforce. The study was conducted in an anonymous Qatari public shareholding company.

Findings suggest that narratives of self are framed in relation to structural constraints and patterns of adaptation. These reveal the interplay between identity, careers and self‐initiated expatriation at macro‐country and micro‐individual levels. As part of these themes, narratives of mobility and opportunity emerged in reference to career experiences and discussions about themselves (lives, identities, and expectations).

The paper contributes to our current understanding of SIEs and encourages us to consider the importance of context in shaping the SIE experience. Similarly, the scarcity of literature about SIEs in GCC countries makes this paper a timely contribution. These contributions have significant implications not only for theoretical discussions about SIEs, but also for discussions on the interplay between migration, identity and global careers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the labour market experiences of highly skilled migrants from developed countries who are not linguistic or visible minorities in the host country.

The results of the paper derive from interviews with 64 highly skilled British migrants in Vancouver. Participants were asked open‐end and closed‐ended questions and the data from the interviews were coded and analysed manually.

British migrants were divided with their labour market outcomes. Some cited positive experiences such as better responsibility, treatment and salary, while others cited negative experiences such as having to re‐accredit, unduly proving themselves to their employers and not having their international experience recognised.

The results are particular to a single case study, hence they cannot be generalised or taken to represent the experiences of all British skilled migrants in Vancouver.

Governments and organisations should ensure that they fulfil any promises they make to highly skilled migrants before the migration process and manage their expectations. Otherwise they face problems with brain waste and migrant retention in the short term and attracting foreign talent in the long term. They should also consider taking a more flexible approach to recognising foreign qualifications, skills and international experience.

The paper adds to our understanding of migrant groups from countries who share similar social and cultural characteristics to the host population. The paper shows that labour market integration challenges are not exclusive to low skilled visible minority migrants, but also to highly skilled migrants who speak the same first language and have the same skin colour as the majority of the host population.

This paper seeks to explore the perceived value of an executive MBA (EMBA) to the development of knowing‐who competency for Taiwanese women managers.

This qualitative research drew on in‐depth interviews with a sample of 18 female alumni across three business schools in Taiwan. Analysis, using NVivo 8.0, focused on individual perceptions of the development of knowing‐who, through networks.

Women emphasized the benefits of acquiring and developing networks from undertaking the EMBA. Cultural values impacted women's perceptions of networking.

This is an exploratory piece with limited generalisability, however, it indicates the perceived importance of networking to female EMBA students within the Asian context.

Findings extend previous research on the acquisition and development of networks through the EMBA experience. The salience of networking for women is established. The clarification of age or career stage in research on women's careers is needed.

Existing research has established that women drop out of engineering careers in part because of a dissatisfaction with their career development, but women's understanding of career development in engineering has been as yet largely unexplored. This paper aims to explore female engineers' experiences of navigating their careers and their perceptions of barriers to career development, through the lens of the intelligent career framework (ICF).

The in-depth interviews of this study were conducted with female engineers in the UK and analysed using template analysis.

The authors identified three structural barriers that participants felt hinder women's career development in engineering: (1) promotions are more likely to be given to people who are widely known – more often men; (2) promotions are more likely to be given to people on whom high status is conferred in this context – more often men and (3) promotions are more likely to be given to people who conform to the ideal worker ideology – more often men. The women also offered a series of counter-narratives in which they reframed the behaviour they witnessed as something other than sexism.

The findings highlight the significant and systemic bias against women's career development through gender stereotypes in workplaces and an implicitly gendered organisation that hinders the development of the three competencies needed for career advancement. The authors describe a range of counter-narratives that the participants use to help them to make sense of their experiences. Finally, the authors illustrate the application of the intelligent career framework (ICF) as a lens to view the career development culture of an organisation.

Translating the well-established theory of the gendered organization into strategic interventions that build more gender equitable organizations has proven to be difficult. The authors introduce the emergence of the “bifocal approach” and its subsequent development and examine the potential of the “bifocal approach” as a feminist intervention strategy and an alternative means of countering gender inequalities in organizations. While pre-existing transformative interventions focus on more immediately apparent structural change, the focus begins with the development of individuals. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Developed through iterative cycling between theory and practice, the “bifocal approach” links the existing focus on women’s development with a focus on transformative organizational change. The bifocal approach deliberately begins with the organization’s current way of understanding gender in order to build towards frame-breaking transformative change.

The authors show how the bifocal is able to overcome some of the main difficulties of earlier transformative approaches, maintaining organizational access, partnership building, sustaining a gender focus and ultimately sustaining the change effort itself. The bifocal approach seeks structural change, however, the change effort rests with individuals. The development of individuals, as conceived within the bifocal approach was designed to create a “small wins” ripple effect, linking individual (agency) and organizational change (structure).

The bifocal approach offers a comprehensive re-modelling of traditional interventions for other scholars and practitioners to build on. Organizational interventions previously categorized as “fixing women” could be re-examined for their capacity to provide the foundation for transformative change.

The contribution of this paper lies in proposing and examining the bifocal approach as a feminist intervention strategy that overcomes the dualism between the existing frames of organizations and the transformative frame of scholars, in order to move practice and theory forward.

This paper introduces intersectional situatedness to develop inclusive analyses of leadership. Intersectional situatedness recognises the contextual and situated nature of experiences and their interaction with socially constructed categories of difference.

The paper draws on memory work by three feminist academics who situate their understandings and experiences of leadership as part of socio-historical contexts.

Understandings and experiences of leadership are multifaceted and benefit from being examined in their intersectional situatedness. This way, the simultaneity of visible and invisible disadvantage and privilege, which accumulate, shift and get reconfigured across the life course and are based on particular intersectional identity invocations, can be integrated into narratives about leadership.

Interrogating gender-in-leadership adopting an intersectional situatedness helps to advance the field by embedding the recognition, problematisation and theorisation of situated difference as critical to understand leadership, its meaning and its practice in management and organisations.

In embedding intersectional situatedness in the analysis of leadership, more inclusive understandings of leadership are qualified that recognise differences positively and support changing the narratives around the meaning of “leader” and “good leadership”.

Intersectional situatedness helps to identify tangible ways to see how inequalities impact women’s career progression to leadership and enable more nuanced conversations about privilege and disadvantage to advance feminist social justice agendas.

The paper reveals the narrow and restricted understandings of leadership and how this influences who is regarded as a legitimate leader. In addition, it adopts a methodology that is not commonly used in gender-in-leadership research.

This paper investigates how (1) a work environment designed to sustain creativity (i.e. through flexible arrangements and elements of the social-organizational work environment) and (2) the amount of enacted work interactions among employees, interpreted as facilitators of new idea generation (i.e. outdegree centrality in instrumental networks), differently impact creativity and work–life balance.

The authors conducted a quantitative study in a knowledge-intensive multinational company and collected data through a survey on a sample of 207 workers.

Findings highlight that flexible work arrangements are positively related to increased work–life balance but not to creativity, whereas having access to a social-organizational work environment designed to foster creativity is associated to an increased level of idea generation, but to a reduction in work–life balance. In addition, centrality in instrumental social networks is also associated to a reduction of work–life balance. Findings thus point to a potential trade-off between structures aimed at increasing creativity and initiatives aimed at engendering work–life balance.

The research contributes to the current debate on new organizational practices for innovation and creativity, highlighting their unexpected implications for workers. The research also contributes to the literature on work–life balance by unraveling previously unexplored antecedents, i.e. social networks and the social-organizational work environment designed for creativity.

The purpose of the research is to analyze the factors that determine the intention of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to adopt the Metaverse. For this purpose, the analysis of the effort expectancy and performance expectancy of the constructs in relation to business satisfaction is proposed.

The analysis was performed on a sample of 182 Spanish SMEs in the technology sector, using a PLS-SEM approach for development. For the confirmation of the model and its results, an analysis with PLSpredict was performed, obtaining a high predictive capacity of the model.

After the analysis of the model proposed in this research, it is recorded that the valuation of the effort to be made and the possible performance expected by the companies does not directly determine the intention to use immersive technology in their strategic behavior. Instead, the results obtained indicate that business satisfaction will involve obtaining information, reducing uncertainty and analyzing the competition necessary for approaching this new virtual environment.

The study represents one of the first approaches to the intention of business behavior in the development of performance strategies within Metaverse systems. So far, the literature has approached immersive systems from perspectives close to consumer behavior, but the study of strategic business behavior has been left aside due to the high degree of experimentalism of this field of study and its scientific approach. The present study aims to contribute to the knowledge of the factors involved in the intention to use the Metaverse by SMEs interested in this field.