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The purpose of the study is to explain why some foreign firms are accepted in a host country, while others are not.

The paper is conceptual. It first articulates the meaning of firm acceptability in the eyes of host country societies, which remains ambiguous in the current literature. Second, using a social psychological theory, the paper explores the firm-level attributes that can shape the societal judgment of firms’ acceptability.

The paper suggests that foreign firms’ acceptability pertains to the perception to which they can contribute to the host country’s economic development and societal well-being. The judgment of this is carried out by emphasizing three types of organizational cues, which indicate firms’ capacity to contribute.

This conceptual paper contributes to the understanding of firms’ social acceptance in a host country by explicating the meaning of social acceptability and exploring the evaluation mechanism local actors adopt to judge foreign firms. The paper would benefit from empirical investigation by future research.

The meaning of social acceptability of foreign firms remains largely implicit in the literature; likewise, the evaluative mechanism of the firms’ acceptability is little researched. The paper addresses these two issues by undertaking a critical theory stance. It builds on a social psychology theory, multinational corporation (MNC) literature and economic nationalism, thus demonstrating a multidisciplinary approach.

Three distinct trends are evolving that characterize the challenges facing corporate planners in managing language as a corporate asset. These are the evolution of the knowledge economy, the globalization of business and economy, and the increasing diversity of the workforce. These trends call for attention to the role language plays in the creation of intellectual and organizational capital. Linguists have been hampered by their inability to model how linguistic conditions affect economic processes. They have long attempted to assess the economic value of language as a commodity, but with little success. The purpose of this article is to describe language as an asset, and argue that recent advances in decision sciences have sufficiently removed the deficit in theoretical and empirical research that challenged the linguists.

Drawing an analogy between language and currency, this article identifies the functions that language must perform in terms of exchange, accounting and storage of information, knowledge and know‐how.

Factors that contribute to the value of a language are discussed through comparative analysis of these functions from the perspectives of linguists, economists and decision analysts. Based on the Social Judgment Theory, the article develops a judgment‐analytic framework for the assessment of the value of a language.

Concluding that the corporate and community planning perspectives are divergent, the paper identifies the direction for future research to inform formulation of language policies. The value of a language may be affected by the degree to which the language is used in the demographic community defining an organization's strategic environment, the investment in the language relative to other available languages, demand for the language as a commodity within the organization's strategic community, and so on.

With such conception of language, corporations can begin to think in terms of a portfolio of language assets much in the same way as it thinks of portfolio of financial currency assets.

The purpose of this study is to better understand consumers’ overall perceptions of “being green” in an attempt to address the green attitude–behavior gap.

This study features a qualitative study that uses a projective technique to tap into consumers’ underlying perceptions of those who purchase green products. A follow-up, quantitative study tests the mediation effects of perceived judgment and self-congruity perceptions on the green attitude–behavior gap.

The key finding of the first study suggests that consumers tend to “judge” others based on their degree of greenness. The second study confirmed both perceptions of judgment and self-congruity mediate the relationship between green attitudes and behaviors.

This study explores the elusive green attitude–intention gap with both a qualitative and quantitative approach. Perceived consumer judgment emerges as a new variable to consider in better understanding green consumer behaviors.

The authors explore how entrepreneurs with limited resources legitimated (or failed to legitimate) a new organizational category in different jurisdictions in Canada despite severe resistance. The authors identify three meso-level domains of institutional action (public, administrative, and legal), where actors intervene to change their macro-institutional environment. The findings suggest that these domains mediate the relationship between micro-level agency and macro-level institutions. The authors describe how macro-level consensus about the category legitimacy emerges through a competition between judgments embedded in different discourses and how a particular discourse attains validity, forcing other actors to change their initial unfavorable legitimacy judgments and recognize the category’s legitimacy.

This chapter develops a sketch of a critical social ontology and contrasts it to a theory of sociality as presented in the work of Michael Brown. I argue that the ontology of our social forms requires categories for understanding them descriptively, functionally as well as in evaluative terms. I contend that a theory of power is needed for an understanding of the ontology of our social forms and that this can contribute to the construction of a more critical social ontology. I argue that a critical social ontology is a more attractive and satisfying paradigm for critical theory than current post-metaphysical approaches that emphasize discourse, recognition or other neo-Idealistic aspects of human sociality.

Muzafer and Carolyn Wood Sherif are among the founders of social psychology. Their theoretical and empirical findings made important contributions to the management literature. This paper aims to attempt to underline these contributions and highlights the Sherifs’ interdisciplinary work and their impact on management research specifically.

Using a citation content analysis, the influence of the Sherifs on management research is detailed by examining how their work has contributed to research published in top management journals.

The Sherifs’ work has influenced numerous research streams related to organisational groups, social norms, assimilation contrast theory and a combination of various other topics. Additionally, these works helped originate team and workgroup research in organisation theory.

This is the first manuscript of its type to examine the influence of the Sherifs on management research. Their story is a testament to the impact that social psychology researchers have had in developing modern thought about organisational issues. This work also addresses potential areas for future research building on the Sherifs’ work.

Although religiosity and advertising messages have been extensively examined in the existing literature separately, studies which correlatively examine both these aspects are very limited. This paper aims to reveal the influence of the widely used religious messages on consumer attitudes and of purchase intentions on subjects with different levels of religiosity.

In this study, four different printed advertising messages with and without religious messages were developed for two different products. In this respect, the consumer attitudes toward advertisements and the degree to which purchase intention changed were measured.

The attitude and purchase intention toward the advertisements with religious messages was found to have a higher mean value compared to the advertisements without religious messages, and a statistically significant difference was found between the two. The highly religious participants’ attitudes and purchasing intention toward the advertisements with religious messages differed as compared to the participants with low levels of religiosity.

Indeed, it was observed that the attitude toward different advertising messages and purchase intention differed regarding the level of religiosity. In the last section of the study, the influence of the level of religiosity on purchasing intention and consumer attitudes has been discussed with academic and practical results.

This study has also extended the practical implications of social judgment theory, which suggests that the further the consumers’ initial position to the new message the less is the acceptance of that message, and it contributes to its methodological and theoretical development. Whether a religious advertisement message is considered more or less acceptable depends on the level of religiosity and the positioning strategy adopted in the advertisement. In the present study, it is observed that as the level of religiosity increases, purchase intention and the attitude towards the advertisement with religious message increase in permissible(halal) goods. However, when prohibited (haram) services are considered, an increase in the subjects' level of religiosity brings about a decrease in the purchase intention and the attitude towards the advertisement with religious message. Therefore, this study validates social judgment theory.

A significant implication for the marketing practitioners is that religiosity could be one of the criteria in segmenting market. A religiously prohibited product might gradually feel more irritating as the intensity of religious message increases in an advertisement. Thus, it is an important consideration for an organization offering faith-based products in mono-religious societies. Clearly, marketers need to be very careful when they use religious symbols in the secular marketplace, which raises the question – What factors underlie a positive response to religious message use in advertisement?

Religion was a taboo subject in society in the recent past; it has not been comprehensively investigated in marketing literature; moreover, it is evident that this situation continues to exist at present. It can, therefore, be said that the efforts to conceptualize religion’s influence on marketing and consumer behavior have been scarce.