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The lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and others (LGBTQI+) movement has been the focus of companies that seek to win over consumers by supporting diversity. Any positioning, however, that is not perceived as being consistent and genuine can harm the brand's image. Through a queer theoretical perspective, the authors explore perceptions of LGBTQI+ consumers regarding brand activism.

Qualitative research was carried out that involved interviewing Brazilian consumers who are part of the LGBTQI+ community.

Aspects of the identity of these individuals draw closer to those brands that share the same values the individuals have. Brand activism is perceived positively in terms of the brand's representativeness and social impact. When activism is perceived as inauthentic, activism generates a backlash and consumers begin to boycott brands as the consumers associate positioning with woke-washing practices.

The results indicate that to adopt an activist stance with regard to the LGBTQI+ public, brands need to be consistent in the brands' communication and advertising and in brands' organizational culture and diversity. This research provides important indicators for brands that genuinely want to support the LGBTQI+ community and is the first to use queer theory to analyze brand activism.

To analyze the emergence of cyberbullying in the news and to unveil the extent to which this new social problem is being constructed as a moral panic.

Ethnographic content analysis is conducted on a sample of 477 local and national newspaper articles published from 2004 to 2011. Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s five criteria of a moral panic – consensus, concern, hostility, disproportionality, and volatility – are used as a lens to analyze how this issue emerged in U.S. culture.

News coverage of this issue erupted within a very short time period, drawing important attention to a previously unknown social problem facing youth. Yet in the construction of cyberbullying as a new threat to social order, the news coverage sometimes inflates the magnitude and severity of the problem. In doing so, the media work to misrepresent, misinform, and oversimplify what is a more complicated and perhaps not yet fully understood issue among youth today.

Electronic aggression is something that is of growing concern to children, parents, educators, and policymakers. Evidence has begun to show that its effects may be as harmful as face-to-face bullying. Since the media play a vital role in the designation of certain issues as worthy of the public’s attention, it is pertinent that this information is presented in an accurate fashion, rather than simply promoting a moral panic around the topic.

Future research should move beyond print media to examine how TV, popular culture, and social media sites construct this problem. This should include research on the public’s understanding and interpretation of these mediated forms of communication.

Current research remains unclear on what factors contribute to cross‐functional team (CFT) success. Thus, the primary purpose of this investigation is to examine internal factors of the team (namely internal team environment, shared leadership, and cohesion) and the influence of each factor on CFT effectiveness.

Structural equation modeling is used to empirically examine the data collected from an undergraduate student sample. Teams worked competitively on a complex task requiring functional area expertise.

Results from the study indicate internal team environment influences effectiveness through shared leadership and cohesion as found in other forms of teams. However, unique to CFTs, internal team environment is not directly related to effectiveness, and shared leadership does not directly influence cohesion. The findings suggest that in CFTs, internal team environment indirectly influences effectiveness.

The findings of this study can be used to expand current models of CFT effectiveness. Additionally, by examining the internal dynamics of the team (e.g. internal team environment) researchers will be better able to account for the previous vast differences found in CFT outcomes.

Managers interested in influencing team effectiveness are encouraged to focus on the internal dynamics of CFTs. To indirectly influence team effectiveness managers should insure teams establish a clear purpose and that members support one another and feel comfortable making contributions to the team.

This investigation offers understanding of how CFTs can be structured to influence effectiveness and provides insight into previously inconsistent findings. Both researchers and managers will benefit from an enhanced understanding of how internal factors uniquely influence CFT effectiveness.

The contemporary zombie genre is known for exploring what the end will look like, with its widespread infection, chaos and violence – all images that resonate in a post-9/11 America. These zombie narratives also speak to a present-day America with their emphasis on diminishing individuality and agency. Unlike early Haitian incarnations of the zombie figure, the modern zombie terrifies because no singular agent possesses the victim’s mind. In contrast, the light-hearted CW television show, iZombie (2015–) rethinks the zombie paradigm. Not only does it envision how zombies would manifest in everyday life, without the requisite apocalypse, but it also subverts the antiquated gender politics common to the genre by providing viewers with a female zombie protagonist, Olivia Moore (Rose McIver) who is not only highly functional, but also female and with plenty of agency. Moore, through whose eyes the show is told, absorbs personality traits and memories belonging to the brains she eats, from frat boy to alcoholic, stripper to housewife. This device creates such a cornucopia of roles for McIver to explore that it brings to mind the work of American photographer Cindy Sherman, providing a rare multi-dimensional woman on TV. iZombie also takes the contemporary zombie text’s reliance on the trop of infection one step further. This chapter not only examines iZombie’s unusual female point of view, but also its portrayal of ‘zombie-ness’ as a chronic contagious illness with many similarities to HIV.

This study aims to argue that opportunism is central to management thought and illustrate its evolution into a central element of the entrepreneurship theory. The authors show that many criticisms of opportunism tend to conflate the concept with other theoretic traditions.

The authors trace foundational works by Taylor, Mayo, Fayol, Barnard, Follett and Simon to limit opportunism under the guise of promoting cooperation in organizations.

Opportunism is conceptualized in transaction cost economics as one of the most controversial concepts in management. While modern management is based on handling opportunism, it is bad for practice, as it ignores innovation, and damages trust and goodwill among organizational members. These interventions serve as a knowledge filter, damaging organizational entrepreneurship.

By tracing the roots of opportunism in early management thought, the authors clarify ethical and entrepreneurial issues of mutual obligations in organizations. The authors also place workplace conflict to be a more coherent framework that better reflects the core concept of opportunism.

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the power of affective pedagogies and playful literacies to resist neoliberal framings of video game play and design in educational contexts.

Focusing on the Giga-Games Camp, a video game design camp for adolescents, the authors mobilize different methodological impulses across a number of different registers, using interview data to trace institutional arcs, focal frames from a GoPro camera to see vitality in action and descriptions of platform events to follow these lines through the shift to online instruction brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The authors narrate three transversal movements of the Giga-Games Camp to reveal how play-centered pedagogies can challenge the neoliberal tendency to assimilate young people’s video gaming practices as a vehicle for future-proof science, technology, engineering and mathematics learning.

The authors offer the concept of actually existing vitality rights to describe how attending seriously to vitality in learning spaces will often manifest organically in very real strategies to reimagine and restructure preexisting, neoliberally sedimented uses of space, institutional configurations and constellations of sociopolitical power.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of personal cultural orientation variables as antecedents of ethnocentric tendencies of Indian consumers. The impact of ethnocentric tendencies on attitudes toward both foreign and domestic products and services is also investigated.

Data were collected by means of a pen-and-paper survey from 800 Indian consumers using a geographical cluster sampling method. A structural equation modeling approach was employed to analyze the data.

The findings suggest that Indian consumers with high ethnocentric tendencies prefer domestic product/service while those with low ethnocentric tendencies prefer foreign product/service. Ethnocentrism is influenced by personal cultural orientations of Indian consumers (i.e. collectivism, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance).

The results reveal that both domestic and foreign marketers need to pay attention to personal cultural orientation in order to understand their customer's ethnocentricity. This could lead to development of better strategies as ethnocentrism has a direct impact on attitudes toward their products/services.

This study contributes to the limited literature on the ethnocentric tendencies of Indian consumers.

This paper aims to explore the challenges the Venture Capital (VC) funds industry in New Zealand (NZ) faces when sourcing new capital. In NZ, there is a significant gap currently for companies seeking VC funding of between $2 and $10 million to commercialise new products and ideas. Also, the estimated financing needs of the next generation of early stage NZ enterprises are around $2 billion of investment over the next 10 years (NZVIF, 2011).

A qualitative research design is applied, given the exploratory nature of this research. In this study, 15 face-to-face semi-structured interviews with VC fund managers, investors and intermediaries were undertaken.

The findings suggest that the lack of observable proven historical returns from NZ domiciled VC funds is a significant impediment to raising new equity capital. Fund managers and intermediaries also note that there is a lack of domestic entities in NZ that have the capacity and current appetite to invest in VC. In part, this may indicate that VC investors are unwilling to invest further capital in NZ VC funds until the current funds realise their existing investments.

Overall our findings support recent initiatives by the NZ VC funds industry to track and monitor the performance of NZ VC funds.