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This paper comments on “Global implications of the indigenous epistemological system from the east” (Li, 2016), which provides an indigenous Chinese perspective on organizational paradox. Li introduces Yin-Yang balancing as an epistemological system that can help scholars examine and practitioners manage paradoxes. In this commentary, the purpose of this paper is to discuss the merits of Yin-Yang balancing and how this approach and other indigenous theories might enrich organizational paradox theory.

The authors provide a commentary and suggestions for future research. The authors distinguish between Yin-Yang balancing as a normative theory, a meta-theory and a lay theory. The authors encourage both geocentrism and polycentrism as goals for future paradox research, enabling attention to the diversity of ideas across and within varied cultures.

The commentary connects Yin-Ying balancing with extant research on organizational paradox.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how national culture influences individuals’ subjective experience of tension when confronting paradoxical demands that arise during their day-to-day organizational experience. The paper further explores two types of paradoxical demands (task oriented and relational oriented) and two mediating mechanisms (tolerance for contradictions and harmony enhancement concerns) that exhibit contrary cultural effects.

Drawing from a sample of white-collar workers in China and the USA, the authors first inductively generated scenarios with task-oriented and relational-oriented paradoxical demands and then conducted three studies where participants rated the perceived tension from the scenarios. In Study 1, they examined cross-cultural differences in perceived tension and the mediating role of tolerance for contradictions. In Study 2, they primed Americans with proverbs that promoted tolerance for contradictions. In Study 3, they examined the indirect effects of harmony enhancement concerns in China in relational-oriented paradoxical demands.

The results found that for task-oriented paradoxical demands, Chinese participants were less likely than American participants to experience tension and the effects were mediated by a higher tolerance for contradictions. Americans exposed to proverbs that promoted tolerance for contradictions also experienced less tension. For relational-oriented paradoxical demands, on the other hand, the authors found no cross-cultural differences, as the indirect effects of a tolerance for contradictions were mitigated by negative indirect effects of greater harmony enhancement concerns.

This paper demonstrates that culture can influence the tension that individuals subjectively experience when they confront paradoxical conditions, suggesting that individuals learn implicitly how to cope with tensions associated with paradoxes from their broader cultural environment. However, the authors also found different cultural effects within different paradoxical conditions, suggesting that the knowledge that individuals acquire from their broader cultural environment is multifaceted.

This paper considers the implications of reform efforts that rely on charter management organizations to assume operational control of underperforming neighborhood schools. The purpose of this paper is to examine the way in which changes to the education sector place enormous pressure on these organizations to both manage instruction and their social environments.

The research presents the results from a longitudinal case study of two organizations operating within the Tennessee Achievement School District (ASD). Interviews, observations and document analysis provided insight into the perspectives of school operators, state officials and community leaders. The study design allowed researchers to observe the influence of the environment on school operators over a four-year period.

Results show that the environment that included a muscular state, market pressures, NGOs and local communities placed an extreme and contradictory set of demands on organizations operating schools, pressing them to develop robust systems of instruction, leadership and teacher development while actively working to ensure social legitimacy in the community. Neither a national network nor a small local startup began with a strategy aligned to these environmental demands, and both needed to make substantial revisions.

Research into contemporary educational reform should account for rapidly evolving environments that feature a complex mix of resources and incentives. Careful examination of the consequences of these environments for educational organizations will further our understanding of how markets, communities and governments are shaping the education sector.

The extraordinary challenges that confront organizations that operate in crowded and contested environments preclude fast or dramatic results. Policymakers and the public should assume an incremental process of organizational learning and improvement. Setting unrealistic expectations and focusing exclusively on impact risks delegitimizing organizations and policy initiatives before they have time to adapt.

This research reported here is among the few studies that have explored the experiences and implications of NGOs that have attempted to assume operational control of underperforming neighborhood schools. The popularity of this approach among a growing number of states highlights the importance of this topic.

While trends of health and well-being have boosted the development of sports nutrition products, consumer research is limited. The purpose of this paper is to profile sports nutrition users and non-users, and to explain users’ preference and equity of sports nutrition brands.

A large online survey (n=3,165) was conducted with users and non-users of sports nutrition drinks in Belgium. Profiling was based on socio-demographic and sport related variables. For users, brand preference and equity of three key sports nutrition brands (n=1,075) were measured. Thereby, a three-dimensional consumer-based brand equity (CBBE) model was applied.

Both the socio-demographic (gender, age, education and employment status) and sport profile (frequency, context, reasons and sports nutrition advice) had a significant influence on respondents’ likelihood to use sports nutrition products. For brand preference, the effect of sport and socio-demographic profile was only partially confirmed, with advice and frequency of sport participation being most influential. Furthermore, users’ brand equity was shown to be positively affected by brand quality and brand loyalty, while the impact of brand awareness/associations was not significant for all brands.

Insights in the role of the sport and socio-demographic profiles contribute to the understanding of general and brand-specific sports nutrition use. The insignificance of brand awareness/associations for Brand A points to the notion of other implicit factors that possibly mask or transform the effect of brand awareness, yet do not influence brand quality and loyalty. Future theory development could integrate the CBBE model with other explanatory determinants related to consumer (health) behavior theories, or consumer perceptions on marketing efforts, while brand equity measurement could be extended with financial measures.

Variations in the impact of brand equity dimensions further lend support for the diversification of marketing strategies in the sports nutrition sector.

This study is one of the first to examine the customer market of sports nutrition products and brands.

How do social factors motivate and influence scholars when they theorize? By exploring the life of George Homans, this paper aims to illustrate that theories are the products of the theorist, and as such are influenced by individual life experiences.

Drawing on a plethora of archival sources including many personal and autobiographical accounts, this manuscript synthesizes these sources thus providing clear insight into how personal factors and experiences impacted Homans's social exchange theory.

This research concludes that Homans's journey into theorizing was an act of providence; that his early career, personal background, and social capital interacted with several factors beyond his control thus leading to his interest in social exchange processes.

This is the first research endeavor exploring the context, sentiments and motivations of George Homans as he began to lay out social exchange theory.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how consumers in emerging market respond to sustainable development goals initiatives by marketers and firms. The study seeks to identify how sustainable marketing strategies contribute to attaining the SDGs in Ghana, a developing and emerging country in sub-Saharan Africa.

A positivist methodological framework was used for the collection of data, analysis and theoretical development in this research. A total of 780 questionnaires were handed out. Out of this number, a total of 650 were returned. However, due to missing values, 622 valid responses were used for analysis. Of the valid responses, 306 (about 49.23%) were males while 316 were females, representing about 50.8%. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse data and investigate the relationship amongst advertising, packaging, pricing, green marketing strategies and purchasing behaviour.

Study findings provide insight into how marketing strategies affect consumer purchasing decisions and brand loyalty. Findings revealed positive relationship between green marketing and purchase behaviour. Empirical results from this study also confirm the mediating role of price on the relationship between green marketing strategies and purchase behaviour.

While this study is limited to a single country Ghana, the findings can have far-reaching implications for many countries in the emerging markets sector. The study provides a vivid illustration of how environmental concerns can affect consumers' attitude towards products or services.

Policy on environmental issues can be developed from this study. Marketers can be more effective at how to effect consumer behaviour using findings from this research.

Firms employing green marketing strategies must be aware of the importance the youth places on sustainability and develop strategies that enhance social acceptance by the youth.

To the authors' knowledge, sustainable and environmental issues have been researched on, but pricing and advertising have not been used as a mediating variable on purchasing behaviour in Ghana. Moreover investigation of green marketing strategies and purchase behaviour, advertising packaging and brand loyalty using structural equation modelling analysis within the Ghanaian public space is unique.

The purpose of this article is to integrate organizational capabilities into the place branding process to showcase how a lead destination marketing organization (DMO) can influence a customer-based brand equity outcome. Doing so highlights the strategic, relational nature of place branding. The authors focus specifically on first- and zero-order capabilities, integrating absorptive capacity (first-order) and an innovation capability (zero-order) into a place branding framework. We define an innovation capability within a place branding context and offer absorptive capacity as a mechanism through which DMO leaders can exploit external knowledge acquisition.

The paper presents a theoretical framework of the place branding process that integrates firm capabilities. A framework based on analyzing existing place branding models and integrating organizational capabilities, which find root in strategic management literature, was developed.

Findings indicate that existing frameworks address operational and customer capabilities in some manner yet largely ignore innovation capabilities. A definition of an innovation capability for place brand managers and scholars is offered, and offer absorptive capacity as means to integrate external knowledge into the DMO. Utilizing multiple levels of capabilities allows a firm to influence customer-based brand equity. Testable propositions based on the authors' framework are offered.

Managerial implications of integrating stakeholder capabilities into place branding include appreciating a culture of innovation within DMOs, learning from external stakeholders meaningfully and regularly and encouraging creative thinking that can produce new processes, policies or services.

By integrating organizational capabilities, attention is drawn to internal aspects of the place branding process the place can control directly. Capabilities dictate how an organization sees itself; learns from its stakeholders; and then integrates that knowledge into organizational, stakeholder and innovation capabilities. Therefore, capabilities are inherently internal mechanisms through which a DMO can influence place brand outcomes, which are understood here as brand equity elements.

The purpose of this paper is to add a needed sport foundation for the brand community conversation evolution within the International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship (Popp et al., 2016; Richelieu, 2008; Trail et al., 2016) from the spark of Gladden and Funk’s (2001) brand association and loyalty in sport.

This paper traces the evolution of brand community research from its beginnings in the general business literature to the current brand community research in sport marketing today. Muniz and O’Guinn (2001) define brand communities as a specialized and non-geographically bound community based around a set of structured social relationships amongst admirers of a brand and are often recognized as the most integral relationship component of consumers to brands (Muge and Ozge, 2013).

Media transcends geography and brand communities will continue to transcend geography to the boundaries of mass media.

With this growing importance on attachment to brand community (ABC) through mass media, or attachment team in the sport context, further exploration on attachment variables is critical for the success of the next evolutionary stage of brand communities.

An ABC framework in the sport setting is proposed through multidisciplinary variables gathered in a review of brand community literature to address the unique attachment perspectives of sport consumers.

We expand on the use of monuments and memorials in the social studies classroom, while further promoting a more inclusive curriculum that better represents women in the social studies. The way and frequency in which history textbooks and social studies classrooms represent women has improved over the decades; though, it still needs refining. The imbalance goes beyond the social studies classroom and includes the very resources we are advocating social studies teachers use, the United States’ historical monuments and memorials. We, therefore, offer social studies teachers a rationale, resources, and suggested activities for incorporating monuments and memorials commemorating the role of females in U.S. history. Considering less than eight percent of the United States’ cataloged, public outdoor statues honoring individuals are of women.

This paper aims to investigate how the abstract marketing concept of brand heritage is operationalized through visual elements on social media.

A mixed-methods approach combines interviews with marketing experts, a focus group with specialized academics, an open coding of Instagram images and the systematic coding of 800 images of eight champagne brands (company-generated content).

The study identifies 20 brand heritage codes (e.g. groupings of brand heritage visual cues with homogenous meanings). These codes are combined in three different factors (brand symbols, product legacy and consumption rituals) that discriminate between brands.

The paper offers a description of what brand heritage looks like in practice. This visual operationalization of brand heritage is based on a single category, a limitation that further research can address. The results also contribute to research on visual brand identity and provide practical insights for the management of brand heritage at the product brand level.

This paper bridges the gap between the strategic management of brand heritage as a resource and the way it is concretely made available to the consumers.