Search results

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, to explore the intricacies of culture along with the complex contextual factors that affect the selection, implementation and use of social media as an organizational communication channel in emerging markets. Second, by using Hofstede’s dimension of cultural variability as a framework, the paper identifies different variables that impact usage and adoption of social media in emerging markets.

A review of literature was employed for this study to glean different factors that influence social media use in less economically developed countries and emerging markets. The selected literature consisted of the following keyword phrases “social media” and “emerging markets.” The term “culture” was used to narrow the scope of the analysis.

The analysis provides insights about how elements such as context, culture, communication preference, trust, gender and literacy affect social media use of individuals within organizations and merchants operating in emerging markets. The paper, in particular suggests that all social media campaigns contain important cultural considerations for potential users who will interact with the social networks in emerging markets.

The review of literature may not have been all inclusive. Hence, certain relevant studies may have been excluded based their lack of selected keywords. Furthermore, currently there are not enough published studies in social media usage and emerging markets to fully explore the topic. Therefore, a call for more empirical research utilizing mixed method approach will provide a more comprehensive analysis.

The paper includes implications for the development of technological and cultural fit in the diffusion of social media technologies in an attempt to achieve desired results in emerging markets.

This paper identifies the need for clarity or understanding of culture when crossing cultural boundaries in particular West vs East through the use of new and social media within emerging markets.

In this study, we analyze sport as a cultural product of a particular place. We use the concept of “tradition” to highlight the collective (as opposed to individual) aspects of sport, emphasizing the importance of temporality, emergence, and novelty in social processes. We conducted a case study of internationally successful Icelandic men’s team handball that provides an interesting topic in this respect. Our findings challenge decades of research on sport that has stressed innate talent, individual qualities or physiological processes rather than the sociocultural processes. They support the interactionist approach to culture showing how local culture, rooted in specific interaction settings, influences the formation and development of a successful sport tradition. It is the way that cultural elements interact and combine in various networks that is crucial for national variations in playing sport. The social processes involved are best captured by Mead’s concepts of emergence, novelty, and the principle of sociality. These concepts help us to explain how unique national styles of playing sports derive from general cultural and social mechanism that interact to produce emergent and novel national variations. Our findings also support and extend earlier work on craftsmanship indicating that crafts-work, which is a part of an organized community resembling the old “workshop,” explains in part how innovations originate in sport-specific and other local networks. These theories offer a sociological extension of pragmatic theories of learning, emphasizing the group in the tradition of Mead.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the possible relationship of religion and culture with the social capital in a particular region.

The data of 85 regions from 26 European countries are analysed. Regression analysis is used for analysing cultural dimensions, religion-related aspects and the communist past as possible factors of social capital components. In addition, graphic analysis is used for the generalisation of the results.

The results from both the regression and graphic analyses indicate that cultural dimensions capture the possible reasons for different levels of social capital better than religion-related aspects or the division according to the communist background.

Conclusions can be drawn only for the European regions analysed. Data were not available for regions in all European countries and including control variables was limited by the data availability.

When intending to develop policies for increasing social capital, the culture of a particular region should be assessed in order to predict the success of the policies.

The novelty of this study lies in including cultural dimensions based on Hofstede’s concept to the set of possible factors determining the level of social capital in a region.

Earlier studies of social capital have focused on its influence on various aspects of business. There is substantial void in the literature on how social capital enables learning culture in organizations. The purpose of this paper is to explore direct and indirect relations between dimensions of social capital and learning culture in the organizational context.

A survey-based research was conducted in which the questionnaire based on the Dimensions of Learning Organization Questionnaire (DLOQ) and social capital was used. Participants in this study were employees from an IT organization based in India. Data was subjected to structural equation modeling to understand causal relations between social capital and learning culture.

This empirical study emphatically shows that parameters of social capital positively influence individual learning. Results show that shared vision, shared narratives in the cognitive dimension; trust and identification in the relational dimension; and mutual confiding in the structural dimension have a positive influence on individual learning.

Findings in this paper indicate that a culture of learning in organizations starts with individuals and it can be fueled and sustained by social capital embedded within the organization if managers focus on enabling the factors identified in this study through policies and practices.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of organizational culture (OC) on social capital (SC) between experts of research-based industrial organizations who were aware of the subject of research.

The tools in this study were the native and modified questionnaire of Denison OC model with 33 items and Abili’s developed questionnaire based on Nahapiet and Ghoshal model for SC with 24 items. Validity of questionnaire well approved based on face validity method by experts, specialists and professors of management. Using the results of pre-test, Cronbach’s alpha was showed the very high reliability. Because of the low number of experts, we did not sampling and decided to distribute questionnaires among all of them. In all, 120 completely filled questionnaires were returned out of the 134 distributed. For examining the main hypothesis and sub-hypothesis of this study simple linear regression and multiple regression analysis were used.

The results of regression analysis showed that regression line ascribes changes in dependent variable (SC) to independent variable (OC). It means that in research-based industrial organizations, OC has a significant positive impact on SC and cultural traits with internal focus have more impact on SC than those with external focus. Then, with the use of parametric tests, the relationship between OC and SC and between components of OC and SC was investigated. Finally, Pearson correlation tests results confirmed the significant relationships. Overall, the results of this study show the significant, positive, strong relationship between OC and SC.

As there are not many studies about the impact of OC on SC, this paper’s findings will be useful to assess and improve the cultural situation for increasing the SC in organization.

The purpose of this paper is to disentangle individual-level gender differences and norm-based gender roles and stereotypes to provide a finer-grained understanding of why female and male entrepreneurs experience different growth returns from their social networks across different national cultures.

This research uses a survey of 637 (278 female and 359 male) entrepreneurs across four nations varying on relational culture (importance of social relationships) and gender egalitarianism (importance of gender equality or neutrality in social and economic roles).

The authors find evidence that male entrepreneurs in high relational cultures benefit the most in terms of growth in revenues from larger network size while women in low relational cultures benefit the least. In cultures with low gender egalitarianism, male entrepreneurs benefit more from their larger social networks than did the female entrepreneurs.

The study presents implications for female entrepreneurs’ behaviors to gain more benefits from their social networks, especially in cultural contexts where relationships are important or where there is equality in gender roles. In these contexts, they may need to develop other strategies and rely less on social networks to grow their ventures.

This research suggests that female entrepreneurs still are disadvantaged in some societies. National policy may focus on developing more opportunities and providing more support to women entrepreneurs as a valuable contributor to economic growth of the nations.

The authors disentangle the effects of gender differences, norm-based gender stereotypes and networks on entrepreneurial outcomes.

The aim of this paper is to create the nexus between political culture, citizens' perception of the political system and democratic order. In academic literature, one of the most important determinants of the democratic order is considered the cultural dimension. Beyond the political institutions and economic indicators, democracy is based on historical heritage, cultural patterns, political attitudes and behaviours. In correlation with all these premises, this article aims to (1) identify associations between social values and political participation; (2) estimate the impact of the political participation in creating premises for tolerance and democracy and (3) observe the relation between political beliefs, ideological position and political participation. Data are collected from secondary sources as World Values Survey, Wave 6. We use as research method the comprehensive case study for post-communist Romania. Empirical results demonstrate weak statistical correlations between personal values and active membership in political and civic associations (r = −0.150, p < 0.001). Traditional dimension of the Romanian post-communist society could be observed in three main variables which reflect personal values and preferences: family, work and religion. Low rates of tolerance are related with the inactivity in the social or political sphere, generating a syndrome of political apathy and alienation. In correlation with personal values, social implication and tolerance we have emphasize the respondents' cognitive bias regarding the meaning and directions of the democratic order.

Culture is a central concept broadly studied in social anthropology and sociology. It has been gaining increasing attention in economics, appearing in research on labor market discrimination, identity, gender, and social preferences. Most experimental economics research on culture studies cross-national or cross-ethnic differences in economic behavior. In contrast, we explain laboratory behavior using two cultural dimensions adopted from a prominent general cultural framework in contemporary social anthropology: group commitment and grid control. Groupness measures the extent to which individual identity is incorporated into group or collective identity; gridness measures the extent to which social and political prescriptions intrinsically influence individual behavior. Grid-group characteristics are measured for each individual using selected items from the World Values Survey. We hypothesize that these attributes allow us to systematically predict behavior in a way that discriminates among multiple forms of social preferences using a simple, parsimonious deductive model. The theoretical predictions are further tested in the economics laboratory by applying them to the dictator, ultimatum, and trust games. We find that these predictions are confirmed overall for most experimental games, although the strength of empirical support varies across games. We conclude that grid-group cultural theory is a viable predictor of people’s economic behavior, then discuss potential limitations of the current approach and ways to improve it.

As a social construct, entrepreneurship is portrayed as an unashamedly masculine endeavour. This forms the basis for much feminist research in entrepreneurship. Despite a sustained research effort in the field of gendered entrepreneurship research this polarised viewpoint remains under researched from the perspective of masculinity. Rather than perpetuate the polarity this short article aims to consider the concept of gendered entrepreneurial regimes as an explanatory variable.

Using documentary analysis techniques this article seeks to document the existence of a particular gendered local regime in the form of “Essex‐Boy culture”.

The findings although tentative indicate that as a recognised gendered local regime Essex‐Boy identity manifests itself physically at a conceptual, gendered, geographic, community and cultural level. Semiotically it can be expressed as a legitimate business identity, a criminal identity, a celebrity status, a political identity, as parody, caricature and as metaphor. It can be expressed as an ideology, a doxa, class position, a culture or as an initiating dream. It also exists at a narrative level via memoires, biographies, jokes or scripted insult.

Given that this is a preliminary study based on secondary documents there is clearly scope for other studies to be conducted into this interesting phenomenon.

The study has implications for what can be legitimately studied under the rubric of gendered entrepreneurial research.

This study is original in its exclusive use of documentary research/analysis to uncover gendered aspects of an under studied entrepreneurial regime.