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In the context of international assignments, repatriates are confronted with social, organisational and cultural challenges. However, the impact of community and social support on the reintegration process has gone unnoticed. The purpose of this paper is to identify the influencing factors on the reintegration process of expatriates who were sent to Asia, especially considering social support and the role of the community. In the context of the community, this paper discusses which factors influence the reintegration process after repatriates return to Germany.

In order to research reintegration problems as well as social support and the role of the community, seven semi-structured interviews were conducted with repatriates from Germany.

The central results of the study show that there are variables in different areas that influence the reintegration process of repatriates sent to Asia, which have both reintegration-promoting and reintegration-inhibiting effects. Furthermore, it was found that a lack of support from social networks in the home country has negative effect on the reintegration process causing repatriates to stay in known repatriate communities.

The results of the study demonstrate that social networks and communities in the home country represent crucial challenges in the reintegration process. Furthermore, it demonstrates the need for future exploratory research into this area to gain further insights into this topic.

Developing a collection of compact disc sound recordings is beginning to emerge as a goal for many libraries, yet the commitment of resources and energy involved in this effort is not to be taken lightly. In addition to the inevitable practical problems to be solved, there is the rare responsibility of constructing a collection from the ground up, an enterprise particularly challenging with a new medium. Satisfying both patron needs and staff requirements is seldom easy; the task of choosing CD's therefore requires careful thought, planning, and monitoring.

Contemporary practitioners of content marketing (CM) often suggest their discipline is an ancient one, yet mainly limit its origins to the custom-published magazines of the late 1800s. The purpose of this paper is to synthesize some of the many definitions of CM and to report the first scholarly history of its development and practice.

This study’s purposes led to the following research questions: To what extent were CM strategies and tactics used before the 20th century? How have the uses and characteristics of CM changed or remained the same over time? Sources included general histories focusing on the earliest uses of advertising and promotions and edited book chapters and journal articles on the histories of branding and early print advertising, marketing and advertising practices in ancient and medieval periods and the development of consumer cultures around the world.

Research findings support three conclusions: CM existed much earlier than often acknowledged; has emerged as a unique marketing discipline, strategically and tactically distinguishable from the others (e.g. advertising and sales promotion); and possesses objectives, strategies and tactics that have remained remarkably consistent in practice across the millennia.

The research supports several insights to the history of marketing and the practice of CM. Some of the CM strategies and tactics identified in this paper, for instance, have previously been concluded to be part of advertising’s history. Findings also reveal that many of advertising’s American pioneers actually used CM to persuade 19th-century businessmen to adopt widespread advertising. In addition, the emphasis on interactive, digital media in CM definitions offers a likely explanation for the recent enthusiasm behind CM as a response to global trends in consumer preferences and global competition, as well as why contemporary CM practitioners have often failed to recognize they are practicing a “new” discipline that has actually been in use for thousands of years.

To provide empirical evidence on the level of savings that can be attained by joint route planning and how these savings depend on specific market characteristics.

Joint route planning is a measure that companies can take to decrease the costs of their distribution activities. Essentially, this can either be achieved through horizontal cooperation or through outsourcing distribution to a logistics service provider. The synergy value is defined as the difference between distribution costs in the original situation where all entities perform their orders individually, and the costs of a system where all orders are collected and route schemes are set up simultaneously to exploit economies of scale. This paper provides estimates of synergy values, both in a constructed benchmark case and in a number of real‐world cases.

It turns out that synergy values of 30 per cent are achievable. Furthermore, intuition is developed on how the synergy values depend on characteristics of the distribution problem under consideration.

The developed intuition on the nature of synergy values can help practitioners to find suitable combinations of distribution systems, since synergy values can quickly be assessed based on the characteristics of the distribution problem, without solving large and difficult vehicle routing problems.

This paper addresses a major impediment to horizontal cooperation: estimating operational savings upfront.

Roots of global Terrorism are in ‘failed’ states carved out of multiracial empires after World Wars I and II in name of ‘national self‐determination’. Both sides in the Cold War competed to exploit the process of disintegration with armed and covert interventions. In effect, they were colluding at the expense of the ‘liberated’ peoples. The ‘Vietnam Trauma’ prevented effective action against the resulting terrorist buildup and blowback until 9/11. As those vultures come home to roost, the war broadens to en vision overdue but coercive reforms to the postwar system of nation states, first in the Middle East. Mirages of Vietnam blur the vision; can the sole Superpower finish the job before fiscal and/or imperial overstretch implode it?

The conclusion of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and former Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s created new areas of opportunity and concern for U.S. national security policy. No longer menaced by the threat of nuclear war from Soviet military might, the United States emerged from the Cold War as the world's preeminent military power. Successful developments such as this often produce elation in the pronouncements of U.S. officials as a recent Clinton administration declaration demonstrates:

The study aims examine the popular master narrative that marketing education in Britain first appeared in the 1960s and understand if its origins can in fact be traced to an earlier period. This is undertaken through an examination of the courses taught from 1902 to 1969 at the Faculty of Commerce, University of Birmingham, Great Britain.

The study draws on a number of primary source materials held at the archives at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham, that are related to the Faculty of Commerce.

The study identifies that marketing courses were being taught in Britain long before the 1960s by the new business schools; we can trace its origins to the beginning of the twentieth century at Birmingham. From 1902 onwards, marketing was consistently part of the syllabus of the undergraduate programme and it became part of the core syllabus of the post-graduate programme.

The findings of the study require marketing education scholars and scholars of the emergence of marketing thought to revise their beliefs concerning the emergence of marketing education in Great Britain and situate this in an earlier period.

The paper demonstrates the historical value of studying early commerce syllabi and the manner in which marketing-themed content was delivered to students.