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The Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) stands as a significant player in the hydrocarbon landscape of the Middle East, necessitating an in-depth analysis of its role in the exportation process to Turkey and Mediterranean ports, thereby fostering economic and political ties and projecting toward the future. Situated as a semi-autonomous entity in northern Iraq, the Kurdistan Region boasts abundant natural gas resources, attracting interest from Russian firms and Turkish stakeholders. However, Iran’s influence in Iraq and the wider region poses a regional threat to the Kurdistan Region’s natural resources. This chapter meticulously examines the oil and gas blocks within the Kurdistan Region amidst the backdrop of transformative global energy market shifts, including the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian–Ukrainian conflict. Through this lens, it seeks to delineate the Kurdistan Region’s political and economic positioning within the evolving regional order.

The Eastern Mediterranean’s energy reserves have ushered in a new era of economic, military, and political dynamics, both locally and globally. While the trade in natural gas has reshaped the region’s economic landscape, it has also sparked heightened tensions and security concerns. Positioned at the crossroads of Europe, Asia Minor, and Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean now serves as a nexus for political, military, and economic interests. This chapter explores how the region’s eastern and southern shores have historically been a battleground for competing political ideologies, economic systems, and military arsenals, notably those of the United States and the Soviet Union. It delves into the complexities of foreign intervention by nations and organizations, with a particular focus on the roles of the United States, Russia, and NATO’s Mediterranean Initiative. Additionally, the chapter evaluates the theoretical frameworks of international relations, including neorealism, neoliberal institutionalism, and regional security complex theories, to elucidate the dynamics of hydrocarbon competitions in the Eastern Mediterranean and their implications for energy security.

This chapter argues that football is central to specific regional, hegemonic masculinities within colonial histories and continuities in South India. Through ethnographic narratives of a prominent football figure associated with the Malabar Special Police, this chapter shows how different performances of a particular mode of masculinity draw power from multiple sites such as regional class networks, colonial legacies, and postcolonial sport. This work demonstrates how a (post) colonial space shores up the powers associated with a male sporting figure. The regional format of a sport is as important as the global format in producing regional, hegemonic masculinity. Analysing the powers and aura associated with this sporting figure helps one to understand the specific meanings of desire and aspirations for status and stability among a section of men in a South Indian context.

The geopolitical significance of the Mediterranean Sea transcends regional security and energy supply, profoundly impacting global security dynamics. Daily headlines underscore the plight of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa crossing the Mediterranean, exacerbating humanitarian crises and European identity challenges. Environmental concerns are further heightened by the abundance of global ports facilitating oil and goods transportation, alongside the staggering number of tourists flocking to the Mediterranean coast annually. This chapter serves as a gateway to the book, exploring the concept of “geopolitics” and delineating its characteristics. It specifically delves into the political economy of the Eastern Mediterranean and the geopolitical obstacles to energy security in the region. The chapter strategically selects four primary issues to dissect the region’s conflict complexity: the Syrian crisis, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the unresolved Cyprus dispute, and the Lebanon–Israel conflict over water border demarcation.

Industrial heritage works within a world of contradictions, contentions and scalar liminality. Archaeologists and historians focus upon oral histories and discourses of tangible and intangible memory and heritage while planners and economists see industrial World Heritage, in particular, as a marketing ploy to redevelop deindustrialized spaces. Within this liminality, we explore the potential for geographical perspectives to solder such contradictions into transdisciplinary heritage assessments and tourism contexts. How might the spatial tools of landscape and scalar analyses expose alternative and sustainable futures within broader patterns of industrial heritage management and consumption?

Using three comparative cases, interview and landscape methods and conducting discourse analysis within a spatial and scalar framework, we explore the increasing presence of industrial World Heritage.

We present both an institutional reflection upon the complexities of heritage discourse across complex spatial configurations and the intersectional historical, cultural, political, environmental and economic geographies that guide and emerge out of World Heritage Designations. Framed scalarly and spatially, we highlight common interpretation, tourism and heritage management styles and concerns found across industrial World Heritage. We point out trans-scalar considerations for future municipalities and regions looking to utilize their industrial landscapes and narratives.

We believe that more theoretical groundings in space and scale may lead to both the flexibility and the applicability needed to assess and, in turn, manage trans-scalar and trans-spatial complex heritage sites. These perspectives may be uniquely poised to assess the complex geographies of industrial, particularly mining, World Heritage Sites.

This study aims to examine the challenges of developing a global business-to-business (B2B) offering from an emerging economy (Chile) during an internationalization endeavor. This study analyzes the development and management of an offering evolving from local to global.

The data were collected via an in-depth interview (105 min).

The interviewee presented a mixed of interesting marketing and/or marketing-related decisions (e.g. marketing–sales interface and marketing capabilities development) that support the internationalization of a firm and consequently its offering.

The data represent a practical, ongoing rationalization of the events perceived by a manager. New theory can emerge from further exploring identified research opportunities.

The findings suggest that an emerging economy firm can gradually transition toward a multinational condition by coordinating a series of marketing and/or marketing related decisions, where the CMO (i.e. maximum marketing authority in the organization) plays an essential role.

This study brings the voice of practitioners to an academic environment and serves as an innovative effort to analyze B2B practitioners’ reality from a scholarly perspective. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first one of the new series “Practitioners Insights” in the Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing.

The purpose of this study is to scrutinize the connection between creativity and innovation in the context of public healthcare. This is achieved by applying the theoretical concept of employee-driven innovation (EDI) to explore employees’ perceptions of their creative engagement in innovation processes, as well as to capture the managerial implications of setting up such processes in the sector.

A critical discourse analysis (CDA) is applied as a methodological lens to capture the interaction between the macro-level production and meso-level distribution of innovation discourse (top-down), and the micro-level perception of, and response to, the same (bottom-up). This study is based on a qualitative approach and is set in the public healthcare system of the Autonomous Province of Trento, Northeast Italy. In total, 26 semi-structured interviews were conducted with 22 healthcare professionals. For triangulation purposes, observation and document analysis were also performed.

The findings of this study reveal that tensions are present between the macro-level discourses and the meso-level strategies around innovation, and the micro-level perceptions of employees’ creative engagement in innovation processes. Healthcare professionals’ creative efforts are not easily recognized and supported by top management, which in turn does not receive a framework of reference in policies acknowledging the importance of human skills and creativity in innovation processes.

That this is a single case study implies a limitation on the generalizability of its results, but the results may nevertheless be transferable to similar empirical contexts. Therefore, a multiple case study design would be preferable in future studies in order to study EDI strategies and policies across various types of organizations in the public sector. Moreover, apart from CDA, other theoretical and methodological lenses can be applied to investigate the interaction between top-down organizing and bottom-up responses to innovation.

This study contributes to the EDI literature by providing a more integrative understanding of EDI in the public sector, demonstrating the importance of scrutinizing the interactions between employees and top-level management.