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This study contributes to the literature by explicating why individuals become effective in performing tasks in intercultural context. Drawing from the social axioms theory and intelligence theory, this study specifically investigates and generates new insights about the role of social complexity belief and cultural intelligence (CQ) in enhancing intercultural task performance.

Two sets of studies were conducted. Study 1 was conducted in Australia (n = 222) wherein survey data were collected from employees (i.e. self-reports). In a subsequent study which was conducted in the Philippines (Study 2; n = 211), archival data were obtained from the annual performance reviews of the employees (provided by immediate supervisors) in addition to the employees' self-reports.

Results are validated in both studies that social complexity belief relates positively and significantly to intercultural task performance. Moreover, results show that social complexity belief influences overall CQ (and its cognitive and metacognitive dimensions) and in the process impacts intercultural task performance.

This study offers new insights related to intercultural task performance effectiveness. In particular, this study highlights the role of social complexity belief system. Furthermore, this study extends the nomological network of CQ by explicating how an individual's belief can relate to his/her level of CQ which then influences intercultural task performance. Aside from generating knowledge, this study also offers practical insights for human resources practitioners and for employees who are finding new ways to improve and enhance intercultural task performance.

This research is devoted to the study of social expectations, and the purpose of this paper is to elaborate the instrument of their measurement based on the main spheres of influence.

The research was conducted using a mixed methodology: a series of semistructured interviews and a survey. In the first stage, 15 interviews, and in the second phase, both online and offline surveys (306 participants) were conducted to test the social expectations scale designed. The qualitative phase highlighted the most important areas of social expectations, identifying how they can influence individual behavior. Afterward, the scale of social expectations was developed, and its prognostic function was confirmed.

It was revealed that expectations influence goal setting, motivation, public opinion orientation, emotional experience and decision-making.

This study is an attempt to construct a measurement tool for social expectations and close the gap for many studies that used the concept without operationalization.

The purpose of this paper is to present an innovative approach for the strategic design of public–private partnerships (PPP) and private finance initiatives (PFI) based on ontology.

Adopting a historic approach, it introduces a posteriori knowledge, deriving from the scheme’s stakeholders at the construction and implementation phase of PPPs. Continuous failures of these collaboration schemes and initiatives underline the necessity for a novel project structure. The conceptual argument is based both on empirical and epistemological approaches. It integrates the value-added (VA) of the ontological theory in the PPP/PFI business strategy.

The research emphasises contemporary design gaps of their current structure and proposes an ontological redesign. The proposed redesign produces a conceptually innovative scheme, which enhances the VA business strategies and their objectives to the structure of these collaborating schemes.

The ontological design of this paper is useful for academics and business consultants around the world and especially in Europe for the successful growth and development of such dynamic collaborations.

Enterprise ontology bridges conceptual and structural gaps of strategic objectives, which are primarily responsible for the failures of PPP collaboration.

Pervasive forms of worldwide communication now connect us instantly and constantly, and yet we all too often fail to understand each other. Rather than benefiting from our globally interconnected reality, the world continues to fall back on divisiveness, a widening schism exacerbated by some of the most pronounced divisions in history along lines of wealth, culture, religion, ideology, class, gender, and race. Cross-cultural dynamics are rife within multinational organizations and among people who regularly work with people from other cultures. This chapter reviews what we know from our scholarship on cross-cultural interaction among expatriates, negotiators, and teams that work in international contexts. Perhaps more important, this chapter outlines what we need to learn – and to unlearn – to be able to see diversity as an asset in helping individuals, organizations, and society to succeed rather than continuing to understand it primarily as a source of problems.

The therapeutic community (TC) is a widely used treatment approach for substance use disorders. Several psychological theories have been used to explain its processes but have put less emphasis on the specific contributions of the person’s cognitive resources. This paper aims to offer a theoretical conceptualization using the locus-of-hope theory which expounds on the person’s goal-directed thinking and how it bolsters the TC process.

This paper reviewed contemporary theoretical perspectives on TCs and studies on locus-of-hope theory to provide arguments for locus-of-hope’s utility in understanding TCs. From this review, this paper discusses a formal conceptualization of TCs using the locus-of-hope model.

In this conceptualization, the authors explained that the TC becomes a co-agent in the person’s goal-pursuit by strengthening the individual’s beliefs regarding one’s capability to develop goals together with the will and strategies to attain these important recovery goals. The person’s hopeful thinking boosts the TC protocols in a dynamic fashion.

This paper offers a locus-of-hope perspective that considers the person’s contributions in bolstering the TC process. Reflections on clinical and research implications were provided. This paper aids further in unboxing of the TC.

Institutional economics at the societal level focuses on the examination of interpersonal and impersonal economic, political and social institutions within a given polity and how such institutions might change and evolve over time. Such examination is critical to both international business scholars and practitioners if they are to successfully navigate variations in the rules of the game in international trade and commerce. Whilst institutional economics offers an immense body of literature on institutions, it offers surprisingly few theoretical or conceptual tools for empirical analysis. This chapter discusses five extant frameworks and proposes an ontological theoretical framework developed from interdisciplinary sources to underpin extant frameworks and thereby guide international business researchers in designing more effective research instruments for examining institutional change across and between cultures.

This study aims to identify and categorize the barriers and motivators to value co-creation and to establish its theoretical link with the five axioms of value co-creation.

The study used a qualitative approach based on a bibliographic literature review for identifying barriers and motivators of value co-creation. Subsequently, this study grouped those barriers and motivators into three categories. It further linked those barriers and motivators with five axioms of value co-creation using the grounded theory.

Results based on the categorization of barriers show that the first category “organization and system-related barriers” is associated with Axioms 1, 2 and 5 of the service-dominant logic. The second category “customer-oriented barriers” is associated with Axioms 2, 4 and 5. The third category of barriers “social environmental and economic barriers” is related to only Axiom 3. Results based on the motivators show that the first category “organization and system-related motivators” is associated with Axioms 2 and 4. The second category of “customer-oriented motivators” is associated with Axioms 1, 2, 3 and 5. The third category of motivators “social environmental and economic motivators” is related to Axioms 3 and 5.

These results provide insights to managers for eradicating barriers from the value co-creation process by emphasizing strategic intrusion into those axioms that contain a high percentage of barriers. Similarly, it also provides insights to managers for expediting motivators of value co-creation by strategic intrusion based on the axioms that contain a high percentage of motivators. Overall, this study will serve for greater value co-creation by eradicating barriers and promoting motivators. This study also provides a theoretical foundation for future studies intended to establish a theoretical connection between the barriers and motivators with value co-creation in other industries.

This study is novel in terms of identifying barriers and motivators of value creation by categorizing those identified barriers and motivators into three sub-categories. This study is the first one for linking barriers and motivators with five axioms of value creation for a micro-level policy formulation.

This paper aims at examining the possibility of constructing an Arrow‐social welfare function (SWF) in an Islamic community, that is abide by the Islamic tradition (i.e. the Shari'ah), where the domain of the individuals is defined in the context of Islamic framework. This domain is defined by the Shari'ah, where part of that domain is constrained, such that those actions that lie in the wajib (i.e. obligatory) or haram (i.e. prohibited), where the individual has no choice, must be thoroughly explored with respect to such a welfare function to consistency with the Shari'ah. Individual choice functions only within that segment of the domain that Islamic law leaves to the individual; the individual makes choices concerning actions in which they will not lose any praise or reward if they do or do not act one way or another. My concern in this regard will be the Mubah (i.e. permissible) range of the individual domain. In the process of examining the possibility of constructing an Arrow form (SWF) in an Islamic community, I have added a new Axiom to those suggested by Arrow (1951, pp.22–31). Kenneth J. Arrow, in his book Social Choice and Individuals Values (1951), has argued that five requirements of ‘fairness’ must characterize an acceptable social welfare function. He finds that these are inconsistent with each other. In fact, no welfare function exists that will satisfy all of those conditions simultaneously. As laid out by Arrow, these five conditions are, respectively: (1) universal domain; (2) positive association of individuals' values; (3) independence of irrelevant alternatives; (4) citizens' sovereignty; (5) nondictatorship. These conditions, characterized by Arrow as “seemingly innocuous” together rule out the possibility of deriving a complete and consistent (SWF) (Luce and Raiffa, 1957, p.328). The new axiom which I will refer to as Islamically imposed axiom such that, in the process of formulating an Arrow form social welfare function, it is important to be consistent with the Shari'ah. The Islamically imposed condition will thus guarantee the consistency with the Shari'ah in the process of formulating a social welfare function. This axiom implies that to maintain consistency the following must hold: When ti, (which refers to actions that individuals must do) is an element of the choice set (xi, ti), ti will always be chosen over xi (which refers to the feasible set of alternatives that individuals can choose from), and when tio is an element of the choice set (which refers to actions that individuals must not do), it will never be chosen. I came to the conclusion that when the choice set contains alternatives that the individual must do (wajib) or must not do (haram), the former will be chosen and the latter will never be chosen. Thus, for the general case, Arrow's negative results follow. If these elements are not in the choice set (i.e. all elements in the choice set belongs to Mubah activities), then Arrow's results follow in a straightforward fashion.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of culture on attitudes to contraception by rural-based women in a developing economy.

Based on data collected from 395 rural women in Eastern Zimbabwe, this study examines the hypothesized relationships between values (resultant conservation, resultant self-enhancement), social axioms (reward for application, social cynicism, religiosity, social complexity, fate control and Ubuntu) and contraceptive attitudes, considering the moderating effects of age and education.

Using covariance-based Structural Equation Modelling and Multi-Group Analysis, this study found that resultant self-enhancement, fate control, the reward for application and religiosity significantly relate to attitudes to contraception whilst resultant conservation, social complexity, Ubuntu and social cynicism, did not produce significant correlations. Age and education moderate the significant relationships.

The study's findings suggest that contraception social marketers, non-governmental organizations and health practitioners should develop marketing strategies to neutralize the negative impact of these beliefs held by rural contraceptive consumers to increase contraceptive awareness and uptake in such subsistence markets. In addition, this study provides empirical evidence on the role of Ubuntu as a new culture construct in African markets.

Despite being limited to a single developing economy, this paper extends prior research on consumer culture and attitudes on contraception use by exploring the role of values and social axioms, an imperative issue for rural women health and general subsistence market well-being.

In the extant organizational change literature scant attention has been given to the communication and cognitive processes consequential to organizational transformation. From the communication and sense-making perspectives, this study discusses the role of positive communication involving stories, metaphors or axioms in fostering socio-cognitive routines necessary for organizational change. The study further examines the empirical link between positive communication and organizational transformation with the survey data from professionals who have experienced the organizational change episode. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The study examines the empirical link between the positive communication and organizational transformation with a survey data collected from 174 management professionals who have recently experienced the organizational change episodes such as restructuring, reengineering, TQM adoption or new strategy implementation. With the content analysis of narratives containing metaphors, axioms and stories, the study unravels the underlying clusters of organizational and socio-cognitive dimensions associated with organizational transformation.

The study results affirm the importance of positive communication and its effects on the emotional buy-in, learning and transformation occurring at the individual level, and attest to the transformational effect of positive axioms, metaphors or stories on the organization. The study also revealed that the positive communication diffusing social, cognitive or emotional attributes such as commitment, trust or optimism produces the desired transformational effect.

It is imperative for managers to understand the relationship between socio-linguistic processes and cognitive attributes such as trust, commitment and learning. With the help of right metaphors, stories and axioms that resonate with changing industry conditions, managers can effectively orchestrate the strategic intent and organizational transformation.

Most studies on the relationship between managerial communication and organizational transformation are primarily qualitative case studies focusing on the dialectics of organizational change. This study carries the strong external validity by capturing the connection between managerial communications and their transformational effect with the help of data collected from the management professionals across multiple industries.