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This paper aims to offer a marketing perspective to the multidisciplinary debate on whether religion is expanding, declining or resurging in contemporary and allegedly secular society. Specifically, it examines the “secularization hypothesis”, which predicts that religion tends to lose its central role in people’s lives as secular reasoning spreads and scientific knowledge accumulates.

Borrowing from psychology literature, the authors identify the psychological and social needs satisfied by religion and in doing so uncover its functions. They then discussed whether religion can be claimed to be functionally obsolete.

The authors identified four functions of religion: explanatory, relieving, membership and moral. The content of religious doctrines offers consumers of religion unambiguous knowledge, absolute morality and promises of immortality, immanent justice and centrality in the universe. Religion also provides a social identity, through which people can build meaningful connections with others in the community and with their own history.

A change in the role of religion would be highly relevant for consumer research because religious ideologies shape consumption practices, social relations, products and brands. The authors observe that the content of religious answers is so well-crafted around human psychology that the explaining, relieving and moral functions of religion have not lost reliability. However, cultural change has weakened religion’s ability to gratify human psychology through social identity and meaningful socialization, which led to the marketization of religion, the rise of spirituality and the intensification of socialization around consumption.

This study aims (i) to assess the quest for tax education among working adults that pursuing off‐campus non‐accounting program, (ii) to analyze the level of tax knowledge among the working adults, (iii) to elicit the relevant tax topics to be taught should tax education be integrated into non‐accounting curriculum in higher education. We surveyed 450 working adults pursuing off‐campus non‐accounting program in one Malaysian public university. 190 usable responses were received. The survey found 64 per cent of the respondents were keen to learn taxation, and only 23.7 per cent of the respondents possessed high level of tax knowledge. The topics that they desired to learn the most are basic tax principles, personal taxation, tax planning for individuals and taxation for small business and company. The findings suggest that as we moved into the era of self‐assessment tax system, it is imperative for the accounting academics and the education authorities to seriously consider introducing tax education in non‐accounting curriculum in higher education.

The purpose of this paper is to perform Shariah review of Brownian motion that is used for prediction of Islamic stock prices and their volatility.

It uses the Shariah compliant development model guidelines to review the Brownian motion and its applications.

The model of Brownian motion does not involve any variable that renders it non-Shariah compliant; neither all applications of Brownian motion are Shariah compliant. Because the model is based on stochastic properties that involve randomness, therefore the issue of gharar takes the utmost important to handle in the applications of the model. The results need to be analyzed strictly in accordance with the Shariah whether they create any element of gharar or uncertainty in case of expected price and volatility estimates.

The research suffers from the limitation that it analyses only one model of physics, i.e. Brownian motion model from Shariah perspective.

The research opens an area for Shariah analysis of results generated from the application of advanced models of physics on matters related to Islamic financial markets.

The originality of this study stems from the fact that to the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the first study that extends Shariah guidelines into Financial physics for making the foundations of Islamic econophysics.

In this chapter, I examine how religion can serve as an ideology that has the capacity to bridge people of the same faith who hold divergent political stances. Building on Williams’ work (1996), I propose that religion operates as an ideology when it diagnoses the source of social conflicts, proposes solutions, and justifies action. Yet religious ideological appeals are not always effective at bridging political divides. Thus the key question of this study is: under what social conditions are religiously-based ideological appeals effective at winning people’s support for social and political movements? To address this, I examine the relationship of religious leaders to Latin American movements that aimed to nonviolently overthrow authoritarian states. In particular, I analyze the conditions that led some religious elites to become pro-revolution while others sided with the incumbent regime. Using comparative historical methods, I analyze the different political stances of the Catholic Church hierarchy in the 1970s–1980s in Chile (where the church opposed the dictatorship), Argentina (where the church was largely supportive of the regime), and El Salvador (where the church hierarchy was divided). I argue that ideological appeals for religious leaders’ support are most effective when the religious institution receives no financial or political benefits from the regime and when leaders have relational ties to the aggrieved. Two factors had mixed effects on the decision to remain loyal to the state or not; these include the presence of an armed radical flank, and the state’s use of indiscriminate repression.

The conclusion of the Cold War's U.S.‐Soviet superpower rivalry may have ended the threat of a global nuclear military confrontation involving these powers. It did not, however, result in the termination of international regional conflicts or of military threats to U.S. national security. The collapse of a world political and strategic system ostensibly polarized between two ideologically contrasting superpowers has resulted in the emergence of numerous threats to regional and global order.

This paper aims to investigate the cultural meanings of excessive drinking in three different countries with different levels of alcohol use chosen as case studies of wider geographies representing Northern (Denmark), Southern (Italy) and Eastern (Estonia) Europe.

Data were collected according to the Reception Analytical Group Interview method, using video clips as stimuli to enhance comparability. Eight online focus groups were organized in each country for a total number of 128 participants. Symbolic boundaries defining what drinking patterns are socially acceptable were then analysed to look at cross-national variations.

Results show how different conceptualizations of excessive drinking persist, although a convergence process among drinking patterns is also observed, which suggests that differences mainly depend on meanings and values attributed to intoxication. These are both rooted in the traditional drinking cultures and affected by ongoing social and economic change processes.

Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalizability, even at country level, as there are differences also within the same drinking culture; however, addressing these differences was beyond the scope of the present study, which aimed to contribute to understanding persisting differences in European drinking culture despite different drivers seem to act for globalization of drinking habits.

The paper includes implications for the development of tailored and effective prevention messages, considering rooted attitudes and cultural values attached to drinking and drunkenness in different European geographies, which are also related to conceptualizations of risks and pleasure.

This paper fulfils an identified need to understand persisting differences in alcohol-related behaviours and outcome in different European countries emerging from quantitative data.

The goal of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is to ensure that organisations embrace social responsibility and cultivate activities that provide positive impact on the environment, society, consumers, employees, communities and all other members of the public sphere. Therefore, it is highly important to enhance and augment the teaching of CSR across various disciplines in higher learning institutions. Since 2006, most organisations in Malaysia have been highly encouraged to carry out their Social Responsibility activities, with the government providing support for CSR policies through its tax reduction incentives. Various CSR awards and acknowledgement of the awards provide high value and positive reputation to the organisations that implement CSR-related activities. As a result there is an increasing awareness among businesses to focus beyond compliance with laws in order to respond to the dynamic economic, societal and environmental changes.