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Homelessness and psychoactive substance (PS) use are both determinants of physical and mental ill health, with the homeless population using, and dying of PSs more frequently than the general population. However, there is a gap in research on the real-world implications psychoactive substance use (PSU) has on the homeless population. This study aims to explore the experiences of PSU from the perspective of homeless users.

Purposive sampling was adopted to recruit participants and semi-structured interviews collected data from participants, with interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) generating common themes from the data gathered.

Four participants were interviewed. The themes generated were family and close relationships; cyclical patterns; mistrust in people and services; and low self-worth.

This study is limited by potential bias from researchers who built relationships with participants through the data collection process. Despite efforts to remove this bias, through reflexivity throughout data collection and analysis, some bias may be still present. The researchers saw the participants as vulnerable people who were striving to overcome adversity. Such conception of the participants is reflective of how the participants portrayed themselves. The small sample is suitable for IPA purposes. Of course, it could have been possible that if different participants had been recruited or more participants had been recruited, then there could have been different themes and findings. IPA prides itself on its idiographic focus.

More research is needed on a wider scale to assess the extent and cause of these issues. Increased education and dissemination of research such as this is required to break down stigma within the public and guide policy change in professional services.

This paper interpretatively presents themes generated by semi-structured interviews with four homeless PSUs. As such, these individuals are vulnerable and have faced adversity throughout life from both society and the services they use. Their vulnerability leads to a cycle of substance use and a feeling of low self-worth, which is perpetuated by the perceived views of those around them.

Women's violence is periodically raised as a cause for concern both in the media as well as in discussions among the general public in other platforms, such as online forums. These concerns are linked with anti-feminist efforts to discredit the benefits of feminisms and to counter feminist knowledge on gendered patterns in violence. In this chapter, I discuss the ways these concerns and the associated discrediting of feminism have been manifested in various contexts, including academic research on intimate partner violence. My specific focus is on online forums, where women's use of violence is frequently highlighted for the purpose of creating an image of reversed gender discrimination experienced by men. I illustrate how such meaning-making is employed in online discussions derived from various online discussion forums in Finland. The empirical example is focussed on identifying discursive methods frequently employed in the online contexts and specifically illustrates how those methods are employed for the rhetorical effect of othering feminists, highlighting the severity of women's violence as a social problem and portraying men instead of women as victims of inequality. I conclude with a discussion on connections between this meaning-making and broader patterns in anti-feminist mobilisations of the issue of women's violence.

This chapter critically examines the dialectical relationship between colonial capitalism, racism, state terrorism, and racial/ethnonational domination from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. It demonstrates the deficiencies of theories of global studies. In reformulating and improving critical international studies, this study advances the idea that excluding indigenous wisdom and knowledge from this area has allowed the hegemonic Euro-American-centric scholarship and ideology to limit our understanding of the racist sickness and its continuous evolution in the modern world system. Since this sickness has been hidden under the rhetoric of democracy, human rights, and social justice, even progressive intellectuals have failed to thoroughly comprehend the devastating consequences of racism and terrorism in global studies.

First, the chapter critically establishes the dialectical relationship between colonial capitalism, racial terrorism, and the continuous destruction of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australia. It explains how the dominant racial/ethnonational groups have continued to maintain their privileges at the cost of marginalized societies. Second, using indigenous wisdom and knowledge, the piece exposes the intellectual deficiencies of Euro-American scholarship and ideology from the right and left in global studies. Third, the chapter demonstrates that the claims of democracy, human rights, and social justice do not adequately apply to the conditions of the indigenous peoples in the world. Fourth, it proposes ways of developing a comprehensive critical global studies by critically including the wisdom and knowledge of indigenous peoples.

The article tackles the under-defined notion of communication in strategic communication research and elaborates a taxonomy of semiotic processes, which distinguishes different types of communicative and signalling events. The purpose is to offer an improved analysis of the processes by which meaning emerges from strategic communication situations.

The proposed taxonomy is based on a conceptual framework combining semiotics, linguistic pragmatics and signalling theory. Several real cases of strategic communication are analysed to exemplify the taxonomy.

Different sub-types of signalling events are highlighted and explained. The communicative function of performed behaviours (i.e. when actions speak and do it louder than words) depends on how informative and communicative intentions are managed by the message source and inferentially interpreted by different receivers. It is suggested that the ways in which meaning is signalled can be best understood with an argumentative perspective that foregrounds the inferential processes of persuasion, interpretation and decision-making. The limitations of the transmission vs. ritual and the one-way vs. two-way theories of strategic communication are highlighted.

The article discusses strategic communication events with the under-considered perspective of communication theories in the fields of semiotics and pragmatics. Signalling phenomena are interpreted from a communicative viewpoint, emphasising the argumentative dynamics that constitute them.

This paper aims to introduce the concept of compassion to the field of international business studies. As international business activities continuously intensify and hence generate a work environment characterized by cultural heterogeneity and pluralism, the notion of compassion in a cross-cultural context can be regarded a key skill for employees in internationally operating firms to enable coping with potential cross-cultural conflicts.

In this narrative-oriented type of review, the authors discuss compassion in a cross-cultural context by drawing on the literature in the management and international business studies. By connecting prior research on compassion with the typical research interests in the IB domain, the authors identify and define potential future research foci for a research agenda centering on the role that cross-cultural compassion plays.

The authors argue that the conventional approach to learning about other national cultures, their value and norm systems, needs to be complemented by the acquisition of compassion skills. In todays culturally diverse business environment where employees increasingly work in virtual teams, cultural complexity is hardly manageable alone by developing expert knowledge about respective cultural contexts to prevent cross-cultural conflicts.

By drawing on extant research on compassion conducted in neighboring disciplines of the social sciences, the authors conceptualize compassion in the context of international business research. Because compassion in a cross-cultural context is new to international business research, this study suggests directions for future research consisting of four research streams to guide future research on compassion in a cross-cultural context in international business studies.

There has been significant growth in the number of people getting tattoos over recent decades. While there might be a myriad of reasons for getting a tattoo, there remains a deficit of knowledge in relation to the potential relationship between tattoos and mental health. This paper aims to explore this potential relationship, from the perspective of those with tattoos, and considers the relevance of this potential relationship for those working in mental health services.

Data was collected through an online qualitative survey which asked participants to share their experiences in relation to their tattoos and mental health. The survey was shared through social media and distributed to tattoo shops within the UK. In total, 17 participants completed the survey; the survey data was then transferred to Nvivo and subjected to thematic analysis.

Three themes emerged from the data. First, tattoos as an expression of relationship with self; second, tattoos as an expression of relationship with others, and third, tattoos as a symbol of change. The three domains provide an insight into the complex relationship between identity and tattoos and suggest that tattoos may hold significant importance in supporting people to make meaning following trauma and to communicate elements of themselves to the world around them.

The findings provide an insight into the significance of tattoos which transcends the traditional discourses of tattoos as a marker of risk or deviance. Tattoos may be significant in the process of meaning making and narrating a sense of self and identity.