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This paper aims to explore the socio-cultural meanings of functional foods for Tunisian consumers and to understand how these meanings shape their preferences and practices in the particular context of a Middle-East and North African (MENA) region.

A constructivist perspective based on multi-qualitative methods was designed allowing data collection in a natural setting through focus groups interviews, individual in-depth interviews and projective techniques among Tunisian consumers.

Findings show the complexity and importance of conscious and unconscious non-health-related socio-cultural factors in the construction and acceptance of functional foods by the Tunisian consumer. Common sense knowledge, social environment and tradition shape the constructions and practices of functional foods. These factors may act as a shortcut to compensate for unhealthy behaviour and as a social marker to reflect trendiness and identity.

The findings are specific to the Tunisian setting and may be not transferable to other settings.

The role of information is central in functional food acceptance. Communication on health effects should consider not only the formal nutritional health benefit but also lay knowledge.

The findings of this research contribute in the government’s understanding of Tunisian’s constructions of health and well-being by suggesting that besides health motives, non-health-related factors such as lay knowledge, social influences and conspicuous consumption play an important role in functional foods choice.

This paper contributes to extend functional foods literature by exploring the complex interconnected conscious and unconscious socio-cultural constructions behind functional food choice. It contributes also to the understanding of the food consumer behaviour in the specific cultural context of the Arab-Muslim MENA region, an under investigated setting.

Taking an emerging country perspective, this paper aims to investigate consumers’ preferences for over-the-counter (OTC) drugs, regarding three attributes: country-of-origin (COO), brand status (branded versus generic) and price. The second purpose is to test the effect of COO and brand status on consumers’ perceptions of quality, trust and purchasing intentions.

After a preliminary qualitative study, consumers answered a follow-up questionnaire to evaluate eight product combinations (COO/brand status/price) for three categories of OTC drugs. Conjoint analysis allowed assessing the importance of COO compared to brand status and price, while ANOVA was used to test the effect of COO and branding status on consumers’ responses.

Findings show that, in an emerging countries context, COO is less important than brand status in consumers’ preferences. COO and brand status have a greater effect on consumers’ perceptions of drug quality and trust than on purchasing intentions.

The limited number of factors (brand status/COO/price) could have amplified their relative importance.

Pharmaceutical companies from industrialized countries, exporting generic drugs to emerging markets, can benefit from the favorably perceived COO of their drugs and thus help the acceptance of generic drugs in these markets.

The study has two major contributions. It aims to contribute to a better understanding of consumer behavior in the pharmaceutical field. It also transposes the framework on COO to the context of an emerging country: Tunisia.

Purpose: Cool, a subjective, socially constructed concept has interested several researchers investigating its nature and successful marketing applications. However, the authors note a lack of studies investigating its perceptions in non-Western cultural contexts. The aims of this study are to investigate the meanings of cool in Tunisia, a North-African, Arab-Muslim emerging country.

Methodology: The authors conducted qualitative research through focus groups with Tunisian consumers. The authors used lexical, thematic, and semiotic analyses to investigate cool meanings.

Findings: Findings show that the term “Cool” in Tunisia is mostly related to lexical synonyms and meanings of lightness and flexibility, fun and amusement, humor, and trendiness rather than originality, divergence, creativity, and uniqueness long argued to be the significations of cool in Western literature, despite their minor presence in our results.

Originality/Value: Results show further evidence that the concept is culturally laden and that the socio-cultural characteristics of Tunisia altered its meanings established in the West, mostly associated to its origins and emergence.

The purpose of the current study is to attempt to contribute to the understanding of some socio-cultural factors likely to explain the preference for international products in emerging countries, and more specifically those characterising former colonised countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

The chosen approach is exploratory and of a qualitative inductive nature. It was based on a series of semi-structured and unstructured in-depth interviews with Tunisian consumers about their relationship to local and foreign products.

A set of complex and inter-related explanatory factors of the country-of-origin phenomenon emerged through the analysis, notably the complex of the decolonised, acculturation in situ, frustration towards the West and sensitivity to the Western fashion system.

The main limitation of this research is that the interviews were carried out among people living in the three main cities of Tunisia, which are urban settings.

This research proposes a general framework and a set of new constructs that may be used by leaders of businesses, communications agencies or distribution companies. These elements may help them for segmentation, assortment and range decisions, and brand names.

Given the failure of “buy local” campaigns, this research shows the importance to revive Tunisian consumers’ feeling of identification with their local culture and to reconcile them with their own identity. Suggestions are given to reach these objectives.

This research proposes a framework explaining how the country-of-origin effect in emerging countries operates in a different manner from what has been suggested in the studies conducted in Western contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between strategic human resource management (SHRM) practices and organizational resilience in a Tunisian democratic transition context. It is hypothesized that five SHRM practices influence three organizational resilience dimensions.

The research design is based on a deductive approach. The relations were checked over two periods by using quantitative methods. Questionnaires were addressed to top managers of resilient Tunisian companies. The hypotheses were verified after.

Results showed that SHRM practices affect the resilience dimensions. Analysis showed that SHRM practices enhance the robustness of firms, especially in the second period, and significantly influence agility and integrity.

Managers can use these findings to develop targeted actions in HRM to enhance a specific resilience dimension. They can make better decisions based on knowledge surrounding the precise effects of SHRM practices on resilience dimensions.

The authors highlighted the role of SHRM in developing organizational resilience. Gaps were noticed in the organizational resilience literature. This research is among the rare studies that have investigated the linkage between SHRM practices and organizational resilience. By using quantitative methods and adopting a longitudinal perspective for analyzing data, it leads to better identify the evolution of the influence of SHRM practices on each resilience dimension over time.

The purpose of this research is to study the impact of talent management practices on organizational resilience in Tunisian firms in times of the sanitary crises due to COVID-19.

A hypothetico-deductive approach is adopted. First, it is hypothesized that four talent management practices positively affect organizational resilience. Then, the hypotheses were tested by using quantitative methods. Data were collected through questionnaires and analyzed with PLS-SEM techniques.

Results show that talent identification positively affects organizational resilience operationalized through the three dimensions of agility, integrity and robustness. Talent development and talent succession planning positively influence the firms' agility only, whilst talent retention had no effect on the three organizational resilience dimensions.

The findings of this research may be helpful for human resources managers to recognize among talent management practices those that are mostly associated with organizational resilience and its dimensions. This could help them revise some talent management practices and implement those that are lacking to ensure strong and resilient firms, especially in a context characterized by the occurrence of crises of different natures.

The literature review showed that talent management practices and organizational resilience relationships are understudied. This research empirically highlights the relevance of the linkage between them. It contributes to the rare existent works by identifying a significant effect of talent identification on all organizational resilience dimensions and a positive effect of talent development and succession planning on agility.

The purpose of this study is to empirically analyze the role of sukuk in the monetary policy transmission mechanism through the asset price and exchange rate channels in the Indonesian economy.

Using the monthly data from January 2003 to November 2017, this study uses a multivariate vector error correction model causality framework. To examine the role of sukuk in the monetary policy transmission mechanism through the asset price channel, this study uses the variables of consumption, inflation, interest rates, economic growth and the composite stock price index. Meanwhile, to examine the role of sukuk in the monetary policy transmission mechanism through the exchange rate channel, this study used variables of inflation, interest rates, economic growth, foreign investment and exchange rate.

This study documented that sukuk has no causal relationship with inflation through asset price and exchange rate channels. Nevertheless, sukuk has a bidirectional causal relationship with economic growth through asset price and exchange rate channels. Sukuk is also documented to have a causal relationship with monetary policy variables of interest rate and stock prices through asset price and exchange rate channels. Finally, a unidirectional causality is recorded running from the exchange rate to sukuk in the exchange rate channel.

The finding of independence of the sukuk market from interest rates provides evidence that the trading of the sukuk in Indonesia has been in harmony with the Islamic tenets.

The relevant Indonesian authorities need to enhance both domestic and global sukuk markets as part of efforts to promote the sustainability of Islamic capital market development in Indonesia.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first attempts to empirically investigate the role of sukuk in monetary policy transmission through asset price and exchange rate channels in the context of the Indonesian economy.

The objective of the study is to identify both reasons for ignoring and for paying attention to the country of origin (COO) by consumers when choosing brands of durable goods.

In this paper a qualitative approach was applied, i.e. 25 in-depth semistructured interviews with Polish consumers of durable goods purposively selected out of those who had previously participated in a quantitative survey conducted by the authors.

Among the reasons for paying attention to the COO when choosing brands of durable goods, cognitive (rational), affective (emotional) and normative factors have been identified, while among the reasons for ignoring the COO by consumers, the authors identified only cognitive (rational) and affective (emotional) factors.

The conclusions can be applied by brand managers, e.g. when making decisions whether and why to communicate COO dimensions.

This paper contributes to the international marketing literature as it develops a deeper insight into consumer behavior with reference to the consumers’ reasons for paying attention to and ignoring the COO, with very little published on the latter in particular. Furthermore, it is one of still relatively few qualitative studies conducted so far on COO taking a perspective of a consumer, especially the one from an emerging market from the European Union (EU).