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This chapter reviews the challenges facing educational research and knowledge production, in the independent post-Soviet Central Asia through examination of the case of Tajikistan. The chapter revisits issues discussed in Niyozov and Bahry (2006) on the need for research-based approaches to with these challenges, taking up Tlostanova’s (2015) challenge to see Central Asian educational history as repeated intellectual colonization, decolonization, and recolonization leading her to question whether Central Asians can think, or must simply accept policies and practices that travel from elsewhere. The authors respond by reviewing Tajikistan as representative in many aspects, if not all particulars, of the entire region. Part one of the review describes data sources, analyses, and our positionalities. Part two reviews decolonization in comparative, international, and development education and in post-Soviet education. Part three describes education research and knowledge production types and their key features. Thereafter, the authors discuss additional challenges facing Tajikistan’s and the region’s knowledge production and link them to the possibilities of decolonization discourse. The authors conclude by suggesting realistic steps the country’s scholars and their comparative international education colleagues may take to move toward developing both research capacity and decolonization of knowledge pursuits in Tajikistan and Central Asia.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between satisfaction, congruence, nostalgic connections and trust with reference to brand attachment and behavioral loyalty. Behavioral loyalty was examined through the customer’s intention to continue the relationship, as well as proselytism and resistance upwards of the price in the luxury restaurant sector.

A questionnaire was developed and distributed via email and different Facebook groups which specialized in the luxury restaurant sector in Tunisia. A total of 310 questionnaires were completed and structural equation modeling with AMOS was used to test the hypothesis.

The findings suggest that brand attachment clearly explains the behavioral loyalty of consumers because it contributes toward maintaining the relationship with the brand in terms of repetitive buying behavior. Only satisfaction and nostalgic connection was found to influence brand attachment and satisfaction has a bearing on proselytism. Brand attachment in turn influences the intention to continue the relationship and the resistance to upward pricing, but not toward proselytism.

The managerial implications can guide managers toward enhancing the behavior loyalty of customers through better relational marketing practices.

The research is original in terms of conceptualizing and empirically testing the relation between brand attachment and behavior loyalty within the luxury restaurant sector with a specific focus on Tunisia. This study is one of the first to examine the relationship between brand attachment and behavioral loyalty in the restaurant sector.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of dissatisfaction and anger, driven by the failure of the self-service technology of banks, on customers' post-purchase behavioural reactions, such as complaints, negative word-of-mouth (NWOM) and supplier change. The stability of the failure is proposed to moderate these relationships.

The proposed research model was tested through data collected from an online survey of a Tunisian sample of 300 respondents, using the scenario method.

The study validates the positive impact of dissatisfaction on anger and negative word-of-mouth, as well as that of anger on complaint behaviour and negative word-of-mouth. The relation between dissatisfaction and negative word-of-mouth is mediated by anger. When the failure is stable, dissatisfied users of the self-service technology seek to enhance their negative word-of-mouth and supplier change. The results also show that the stability of the failure enhances the effect of anger on complaint behaviour.

Banks should invest efforts to accelerate the recovery of services to reduce consumer dissatisfaction and anger and prevent adverse behavioural outcomes. Further, they need to ensure that failures are not repeated, as failure stability activates some otherwise non-significant behavioural outcomes, like supplier change.

Previous works have focused on the impact of dissatisfaction and negative emotions for interpersonal services, but very few works have come to associate dissatisfaction, anger, complaint, negative word-of-mouth and supplier change in an integrative framework for an self-service technology failure.

This study examines the impact of financial services employees’ engagement on the attitude toward artificial intelligence (AI) in Sri Lanka. The model developed in this study comprises three constructs to demonstrate employee engagement (EE), namely, psychological state engagement (PSE), trait engagement (TE), and cognitive engagement (CE). Further, the model tests the moderating effect of age and gender on the relationship between EE and attitude toward AI. The authors conducted this research through a survey of 200 employees at Sri Lankan financial service firms. The findings indicate that EE substantially impacts attitudes regarding AI. Additionally, PSE, CE, and attribute engagement substantially affect how people feel about AI. Further, age has a moderating effect on the association between EE and attitude toward AI among financial services personnel. Based on the findings and discussion, the researcher recommends AI’s most significant importance in promoting a high level of engagement. The results would be helpful for both academic researchers and practitioners, especially HR managers, to understand the status of AI in Sri Lanka and formulate strategies to expedite EE.

South Africa is increasingly becoming an attractive market for luxury fashion brands due to the growing middle-income consumer segment, which is perceived to be upwardly mobile. Despite evidence of black South African's exhibition of heightened interest in conspicuous consumption (CC), there seems to be limited research addressing the drivers and implications of such behaviour. This study aims to investigate the antecedents of CC by middle-income black South Africans and the marketing implications thereof.

This study employed a survey questionnaire approach and a quantitative methodology for primary data collection. Data were gathered from a sample of 170 respondents across South Africa and analysed using structural equation modelling (SEM) through SPSS and Mplus software. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to test model fit, reliability and validity of measurement instruments, while path modelling was used to test hypotheses adopted by this report.

Among the major findings made by this report was that social class signalling positively influenced CC. In contrast, CC was not predicted by status consumption (SC). This study concluded that social factors motivated the CC of luxury fashion brands by middle-income black South Africans.

This study's key recommendations were for marketing professionals to imbue overt status cues in their brand campaigns to drive the consumption of luxury fashion brands. Future studies could investigate whether or not the findings of this study are applicable across ethnic demographics in South Africa.

The study extends the discourse of the antecedents of ethnic consumer behavioural patterns in a historically segregated market. It weighs in on the growing research addressing factors driving the middle-income population from emerging economies to consume luxury fashion brands conspicuously.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how interactional justice within a retail context may influence employee organizational commitment and how this may evoke guardianship behaviors that manifest in shoplifting prevention.

This research uses a phenomenological approach conducting semi-structured in-depth interviews with 26 shop-floor employees of two major national supermarket chains in New Zealand.

The findings suggest that interactional justice in the workplace is important in shaping organizational commitment amongst employees. Additionally, heightened organizational commitment may have a significant effect on employee propensity to engage in shoplifting prevention/guardianship behavior. A conceptual model is developed based on these findings.

Retail managers may promote and exercise interactional justice practices with employees to improve their organizational commitment and consequential shoplifting prevention/guardianship behaviors.

The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, and from a theoretical perspective, it offers both a conceptual foundation and empirical-based evaluation of interactional justice and its effect on organizational commitment and, specifically, on guardianship/shoplifting prevention behaviors. Second, and from a pragmatic perspective, the conceptual model derived from this research may assist retailers in developing interactional justice strategies that encourage organizational commitment of employees that consequently leads to employees’ guardianship/shoplifting prevention behaviors. Finally, it explores significance and role of employee perceptions of interactional justice, employee workplace attachment and organizational commitment within the context of retail crime prevention.

The chapter identifies and analyzes scholarly discourses that framed understanding of change and directed further reforms in post-socialist education over the past two decades. It discusses the origins of these discourses, their theoretical underpinnings, evolution, and cultural biases. The analysis of scholarly texts published on post-socialist education draws on methods of discourse analysis and utilizes the concept of sensemaking and the lens of translation to deconstruct how educational change is framed. Most of the identified discourses – restoration, importation, revolution and evolution, transformation and innovation, crisis and survival, glocalization, educational borrowing, system convergence, education for social transformation – originated outside either education or the post-socialist region itself in transitology studies, dependency theory, world system theory, and social reproduction theory. The resultant discourses carried over or challenged the underlying theoretical assumptions, exposed cultural sensitivity, or otherized the post-socialist region. The chapter identifies emerging scholarship that deconstructs framing of the same post-socialist educational phenomena. These emerging approaches reflect local and national searches for identity rather than global agendas. Contrary to the earlier prediction that with the end of the cold war, economic, political, and social institutions would converge into one monolithic world order, the chapter argues that the contemporary world today has come to display diversity, particularism, multiple voices, and the beginning of new histories. This study identifies emerging lines of research that look into the construction of meanings and expose cultural biases, while offering original conceptualization of two decades of scholarship on post-socialist educational change.

The “gender problem” emerging today in CA as it relates to and involves education actually has long history, and was a target of serious social and political reform during Soviet times. We are interested in describing the problematic emergence; subsequent decline; and current difficulties, policies and practices connected to gender equality CA – with a particular focus on education and higher education. There are important historical writings on this topic, as well as contemporary statistical description of the issues. We undertake to illustrate briefly and describe work in both areas to begin this writing. Yet, this chapter is as much interested in the experiences and understandings of gender, education and lived culture as it is in what the history books say and how the statistics read. Our historical and conceptual discussions and generalizations are thus used primarily as scene setters for our later ethnographic accounts.

The aim of this paper is to enhance the effectiveness of pharmacovigilance programs that provide information about medical products to benefit consumers, aid health care professional’s decision-making and improve community health. This research sought to determine whether distinct segments of consumers can be identified for prescription drug safety social marketing and communication activities and if these segments would respond differently to information about prescription drug products.

Theories of risk information-seeking behavior were used to develop questions for respondents in an online survey panel. Latent class analyses identified clusters that were similar in their ability to accurately interpret risks and benefits, preferred sources of health information, medication use and other related factors. Multinomial logistic regression models identified demographic and psychographic differences across the segments. Logistic and linear regression models were then used to compare each segment’s responses to a specific drug safety information product.

The 1,244 respondents were clustered into four segments: not engaged (12 per cent), low-involvement users (29 per cent), careful users (50 per cent) and social information seekers (9 per cent). These segments were distinguished by perceived seeking control, self-appraisal of skill, information insufficiency, self-efficacy, information competency and health literacy. Sources of health information and health-seeking behaviors were also different across the four segments. Significant differences were found among the segments in their comprehension and perceived utility of the content and their intentions to take relevant actions.

From an array of potential behavioral influences, adults can be segmented by risk information-seeking constructs and related behaviors. These segments respond differently to drug safety information. Use of the personas developed in this work can help pharmacovigilance programs around the world develop more relevant and tailored social marketing products, services and content.

A social marketing approach using empirically tested theoretical constructs can be useful for drug safety or pharmacovigilance programs. The results were used to create personas that quickly convey relevant information to drug safety program managers and staff.