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When new technologies become available and cultures adopt them, the result can be either convergence, cultures becoming more similar as a result, or divergence, when cultures adopt technology in different ways that maintain or even further accentuate their differences. An analysis of full‐service national Web portals from different countries, typically offering a search engine, directories of links on a set of selected topics, news items (including weather, sports, entertainment, and stock market results), advertisements and shopping, and free e‐mail, shows evidence of both trends. While most national portals closely resemble the basic structure of Yahoo!, the original free full‐service portal, there are also differences in appearance and features offered that can be attributed to cultural variations based on Hofstede’s framework.

The current software crisis has created a situation where organizations are faced with identified as well as hidden information systems (IS) development backlogs. IS projects are generally behind schedule and/or over budget. Even after implementation, the IS does not necessarily solve all the original problems and is very difficult and costly to use and maintain. Software development and maintenance costs represent the major component of total information technology (IT) budget. Reports on research conducted in Singapore which addresses the question concerning the identification of the skills of systems analysts. Analyses this question from three different viewpoints (interviews about “excellent” systems analyst, newspaper advertisements for systems analyst positions, and a questionnaire regarding hiring, promotion, evaluation and training criteria for systems analysts). The research suggests that there is a discrepancy between the criteria established for the initial screening of candidates and the actual process followed for selection, evaluation, training and promotion of systems analysts. This discrepancy will result in the less than optimal use of systems analyst personnel and may be a contributing factor to the current IS software crisis. While the research was conducted solely in Singapore, it is contended that the results are generally applicable because of the emergence of what is referred to as an “occupational community” of systems analysts.

With the growth of worldwide e‐commerce, companies are increasingly targeting foreign online consumers. However, there is a dearth of evidence as to whether global consumers prefer to browse and buy from standardized global web sites or web sites adapted to their local cultures. This study provides evidence from five different countries as to whether global consumers prefer local web content or standardized web content. The study also measures how the degree of cultural adaptation on the web affects consumer perception of site effectiveness.

As Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott have pointed out, the US TV serial Supernatural owes much of its success to the way it combines horror with family drama, strengthening the affective involvement of viewers in the lives of its protagonists, the monster-hunting Winchester brothers. The notion of home – presented variously as a domestic, feminine space from which the Winchesters and their compatriots are excluded; a mobile and contingent space of masculine bonding; and a hybrid space which allows for self-expression outside prescribed gender norms, but which also holds the potential for danger – is central.

Heather L. Duda has pointed to the ways monster hunters are excluded from the normative institutions of their societies, and this is certainly true of the Winchesters, who live in their family car and are unable to maintain ‘normal’ homes. Later seasons give them a home in the form of an underground bunker, not designed as a domestic space, but nonetheless a place where their hypermasculine behaviours can be relaxed. This chapter examines the tensions that emerge in this apparent move from a traditional narrative of the home as feminine space under threat to something more ambivalent, where masculine identity itself may be in danger.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an update on various methodological issues and statistical techniques pertinent to the conflict management literature. First, issues related to use of laboratory studies, college students, and the study situation are reviewed. Second, two recent innovative statistical techniques, meta‐analysis and confirmatory modeling are described and potential applications in the conflict management field are given.

Intellectual humility and religious conviction are often posed as antagonistic binaries; the former associated with science, reason, inclusive universality, and liberal secularism, the latter with superstition, dogma, exclusive particularity, and rigid traditionalism. Despite popular images of white American evangelicals as the embodied antithesis of intellectual humility, responsiveness to facts, and openness to the other, this article demonstrates how evangelicals can and do practice intellectual humility in public life while simultaneously holding fast to particularistic religious convictions. Drawing on textual analysis and multi-site ethnographic data, it demonstrates how observed evangelical practices of transposable and segmented reflexivity map onto pluralist, domain-specific conceptualizations of intellectual humility in the philosophical and psychological literature. It further argues that the effective practice of intellectual humility in the interests of ethical democracy does not require religious actors to abandon particularistic religious reasons for universal secular ones. Rather, particularistic religious convictions can motivate effective practices of intellectual humility and thereby support democratic pluralism, inclusivity, and solidarity across difference. More broadly, it aims to challenge, or at least complicate, the widespread notion that increasing strength of religious conviction always moves in lockstep with increasing dogmatism, tribalism, and intellectual unreasonableness.

This paper presents the case for personnel systems based on maximizing the differential information gathered about individual abilities and their match to jobs. In the context of assignment to multiple jobs, such systems are shown to be more effective than those based on the currently dominant paradigm of maximizing predictive validity. The latter paradigm favours the measurement of general cognitive ability over multiple specific aptitudes. Recent differential approaches use computer simulation modelling of alternative hypothetical systems to evaluate potential efficiency. The paper reviews the theoretical background on the structure of human abilities which has led to these contrasting approaches to personnel system design, and presents evidence, based on the US Army selection and classification system, in support of the alternative approach. Individual test/aptitude profiles improve the efficiency of personnel selection and classification as well as academic, vocational and career counselling. They also provide a broader, potentially fairer definition of talent than a unidimensional indicator of cognitive ability, and a foundation for the design of learning and decision environments around learner and user profiles.