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International Business, Entrepreneurship.

This case has been used previously in an international business strategy module on MA courses at Kozminski University, Poland.

The case details Audioteka’s (a Polish audiobook company) history between 2007 and 2013, from the perspective of Marcin, one of the co-founders. The company was founded in 2008 by Marcin Beme and Blazej Kukla and internationalized soon after. Marcin was an experienced entrepreneur, while Blazej was a sound engineer. Both sought to combine their complementary skills and experience to start a business aimed at selling audio recordings. The case is divided into Parts (A) and (B) and is designed to teach international entrepreneurship, lying at the intersection of international business and entrepreneurship. Part (A) is set in 2011 and tracks the company’s evolution from the conception of an idea to establishing a start-up and developing a product. Part (B) is set in 2013 and covers early foreign expansion between 2011 and 2013. The case is focused on the challenges that Marcin faces when developing Audioteka and expanding abroad. It allows students to understand the decision-making logic of an international new venture (INV), choices made and execution while internationalizing. Students will be able to explore how a company adapts its product; how it enters foreign markets; how it overcomes the liabilities of foreignness, smallness, newness and outsidership through establishing partnerships with big companies (telecoms, automakers); and how it appreciates the risks involved in this process.

This case is the basis for a class discussion rather than for illustrating either effective or ineffective handling of a managerial situation. From this case, MA students will learn how an entrepreneurial firm makes strategic decisions and becomes international. The first learning outcome is to evaluate the concepts of liability of origin, foreignness, outsidership, smallness and newness, and to explore ways of overcoming them. Second, the expected learning outcome is to assess differences between the Uppsala model of internationalization and born-global/INV phenomenon. Third, students, by examining particular foreign market-entry modes, are expected to evaluate their advantages and disadvantages. Finally, students are expected to understand the concept of “effectuation” and apply it to the decision-making process in early internationalization.

CSS 5: International Business.

The purpose of this paper is to understand in-depth how consumers create value in their lives using WhatsApp, the leading mobile instant messaging (MIM) application.

The study adopts the perspective of customer-dominant logic (CDL) and uses a qualitative multimethod design involving 3 focus groups and 25 subsequent in-depth interviews. The research setting was Ecuador, a Latin American country.

Analysis and interpretation of the participants’ stories made it possible to identify and understand the creation of four types of value: maintaining and strengthening relationships; improving role performance; emotional support; and entertainment and fun. In addition, the present study proposes a conceptual model of consumer value creation as it applies to MIM.

Understanding the way consumers create value in their lives using MIM is important not only for organizations that offer MIM applications, but also for those companies that develop other applications for mobile phones or for those who wish to use MIM as an electronic word-of-mouth vehicle.

The current study is one of the first to address the topic of consumer behavior in the use of technologies from the perspective of CDL; this perspective enables an integrated qualitative vision of value creation in which the consumer is the protagonist.

El presente estudio busca comprender a profundidad la forma en que los consumidores crean valor en sus vidas usando WhatsApp, la aplicación líder de mensajería instantánea basada en móviles (MIM).

El estudio adopta la perspectiva de la lógica dominante del cliente y utiliza un diseño cualitativo multimétodo que involucra 3 grupos focales seguidos de 25 entrevistas a profundidad. El escenario de estudio es Ecuador, un país Latinoamericano.

El análisis e interpretación de los relatos de los participantes hace posible identificar y comprender la creación de cuatro tipos de valor: Mantener y fortalecer relaciones, mejorar el desempeño de roles, apoyo emocional y, diversión y entretenimiento. Adicionalmente, el estudio propone un modelo conceptual de creación de valor aplicado a MIM.

La comprensión de la forma en que los consumidores crean valor en sus vidas usando MIM, es importante no solo para las empresas que ofrecen aplicaciones MIM, sino también para las empresas que desarrollan otras aplicaciones para móviles o para aquellas que desean usar MIM como canal electrónico para estrategias boca a boca.

El presente estudio es uno de los primeros en abordar el área del comportamiento del consumidor en el uso de tecnologías desde una perspectiva de la lógica dominante del cliente. Esta perspectiva permite presentar una visión cualitativa integrada de la creación de valor, en la cual el consumidor es el protagonista.

Tandem wing aircrafts belong to an unconventional configurations group, and this type of design is characterised by a strong aerodynamic coupling, which results in lower induced drag. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether a certain trend in the wingspan impact on aircraft dynamic stability can be identified. The secondary goal was to compare the response to control of flaps placed on a front and rear wing.

The aerodynamic data and control derivatives were obtained from the computational fluid dynamics computations performed by the MGAERO software. The equations of aircraft longitudinal motion in a state space form were used. The equations were built based on the aerodynamic coefficients, stability and control derivatives. The analysis of the dynamic stability was done in the MATLAB by solving the eigenvalue problem. The response to control was computed by the step response method using MATLAB.

The results of this study showed that because of a strong aerodynamic coupling, a nonlinear relation between the wing size and aircraft dynamic stability proprieties was observed. In the case of the flap deflection, stronger oscillation was observed for the front flap.

Results of dynamic stability of aircraft in the tandem wing configuration can be found in the literature, but those studies show outcomes of a single configuration, while this paper presents a comprehensive investigation into the impact of wingspan on aircraft dynamic stability. The results reveal that because of a strong aerodynamic coupling, the relation between the span factor and dynamic stability is nonlinear. Also, it has been demonstrated that the configuration of two wings with the same span is not the optimal one from the aerodynamic point of view.

In this chapter, I analyze the decision calculus of President Donald Trump, using the Applied Decision Analysis (ADA) method (Mintz, 2005, Mintz & DeRouen, 2010). I analyze seven foreign policy decisions taken in the first six months of Trump’s presidency. I find that in his decision-making process, President Trump applies six dimensions. My analysis reveals that the imagery dimension has affected President Trump’s decisions across the board, and led to the rejection of non-compensatory alternatives. Based on my research, I conclude that President Trump demonstrated a poliheuristic decision code. Furthermore, from my analysis derives that President Trump’s decision-making process is mostly intuitive. Moreover, this chapter reveals a polythink syndrome in Trump’s decision unit, manifested in the battle between his two groups of advisors, known as the nationalists and globalists.

This chapter presents findings from a qualitative study conducted among students from Germany, Hungary, Portugal, France, and Poland on their expectations and experiences of learning in two types of international mobility (physical and virtual) during the pandemic of 2020. The authors identified imprints of internationalization onto the students’ learning. They are of a binary nature and manifest themselves in the following dualities: Duality 1: Expectations (new life experiences) versus reality requirements (empowerment); Duality 2: Formal learning (at university) versus non-formal learning (outside formal environments as a part of daily life); Duality 3: Designing (the digital environment) versus reconstruction (the “old order” of university learning); Duality 4: Latitudes (choice of method, place, and time of learning) versus restrictions (staying at home and family responsibilities). Moreover, internationalization through student mobility programs simultaneously show features of some revolutionary changes and evolutionary transformations that have come about during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Public acts of self-criticism in Eastern Europe – a genre cultivated and extorted by the communist parties – did not disappear with the end of communism. In the young democracies of the region self-criticism has become an attempt to diagnose society’s ‘backward’ character and to develop ‘self-correction’ scenarios in order to participate in the Western modernising discourse. On the one hand, conservative and right-wing elites suppose that public acts of self-criticism (performed by politicians, artists or scholars) can endow the vetting procedures of the ancien régime with a sense of social catharsis and retroactive justice. On the other hand, liberal and left-wing intellectuals subject themselves to collective self-reckoning, not only with their choices made in the transition period, but also with the memory of WWII, in order to shape a civil society free of anti-Semitism and intolerance. An analysis based on the discourse-historical approach in critical discourse analysis, Reinhart Koselleck’s historical semantics and Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse, and carried out on the text corpus of selected acts of self-criticism in Poland, aims to diagnose the role these acts had in shaping public discourse on the troublesome past.

The following classified, annotated list of titles is intended to provide reference librarians with a current checklist of new reference books, and is designed to supplement the RSR review column, “Recent Reference Books,” by Frances Neel Cheney. “Reference Books in Print” includes all additional books received prior to the inclusion deadline established for this issue. Appearance in this column does not preclude a later review in RSR. Publishers are urged to send a copy of all new reference books directly to RSR as soon as published, for immediate listing in “Reference Books in Print.” Reference books with imprints older than two years will not be included (with the exception of current reprints or older books newly acquired for distribution by another publisher). The column shall also occasionally include library science or other library related publications of other than a reference character.