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Consumption is a way of communication whereby consumers express, position or/and differentiate themselves within their society or affiliated groups. A great part of consumers’ lives are spent on various purchase activities, and many would be eager to understand the factors underlying those behaviours.

This chapter primarily deals with the cultural, social, psychological and personal factors that affect consumer behaviour. Each of these factors in relation to consumer behaviour is discussed in detail. The types of consumer buying behaviours and the consumer decision-making processes then provide the fundamentals of the topic along with their relevance to Turkish consumers.

This paper aims to investigate firm-level variations in the extent of mandatory disclosures and address the drivers of mandatory disclosure using data from the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) region.

The extent of mandatory disclosure is examined using a disclosure index created with reference to 24 International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRSs).

The authors find that the extent of mandatory disclosure required by applicable IFRSs/International Accounting Standards increases with international presence, group firms, the level of voluntary disclosure, firm age and the education level of company financial controllers. It decreases with firm size and the proportion of institutional share ownership. The degree of board independence is positively related to the level of mandatory disclosure in firms with no state ownership. Profitability positively affects the level of mandatory disclosure to a greater extent in more liquid GCC firms. The results confirm that there is a greater sensitivity of mandatory disclosure to loss than to profit. Loss increases, whilst profit decreases, the extent of mandatory disclosure.

The results promote further understanding of international financial reporting differences in an emerging country setting.

The findings provide a detailed insight to investors, financial analysts, practitioners and academics.

The authors develop a highly granular mandatory disclosure index in a developing country setting and identify key drivers of such disclosure.

This study aims to examine how teacher candidates (TCs) in Türkiye and the USA navigate their intercultural communication skills in a telecollaboration project.

Forty-eight TCs participated (26 in Türkiye and 22 in the USA) in the study. TCs discussed critical issues in multicultural education on an online learning platform for six weeks. Their discussions were analyzed using content and discourse analysis.

The findings indicated that TCs approached the telecollaborative space as a translingual contact zone and positioned themselves and their interlocutors in the discourse by using the personal pronouns; I, we, you and they. When they positioned themselves using we (people in Türkiye/USA), they spoke on behalf of everyone included in the scope of we. Their interlocutors responded to these positionings either by accepting this positioning and responding with a parallel positioning or by engaging in translingual negotiation strategies to revise the scope of we and sharing some differences/nuances in beliefs and practices in their community.

When TCs talk about their culture and community in a singular manner using we, they frame them as the same across every member in that community. When they ask questions to each other using you, the framing of the questions prime the respondents to sometimes relay their own specific experiences as the norm or consider experiences from different points of view through translingual negotiation strategies. A singular approach to culture(s) may affect the marginalized communities the most because they are lost in this representation, and their experiences and voices are not integrated in the narratives or integrated with stereotypical representation.

Teachers and teacher educators should first pay attention to their language choices, especially use of pronouns, which may communicate inclusion or exclusion in intercultural conversations. Next, they should prepare their students to adopt and practice language choices that communicate respect for cultural diversity and are inclusive of marginalized populations.

Speakers’ pronoun use includes identity construction in discourse by drawing borders around and between communities and cultures with generalization and particularity, and by patrolling those borders to decide who is included and excluded. As a response, interlocutors use pronouns either to acknowledge those borders and respond with corresponding ones from their own context or negotiate alternative representations or further investigate for particularity or complexity. In short, pronouns could lead the direction of intercultural conversations toward criticality and complexity or otherwise, and might be reasons where there are breakdowns in communication or to fix those breakdowns.

This study shows that translingual negotiation strategies have explanatory power to examine how speakers from different language backgrounds negotiate second and third order positionings in the telecollaborative space.

To date, limited studies have examined the country-specific social institutions to explain the informal entrepreneurial activities of women, particularly, within the context of the Middle East. This research paper attempts to close this gap through identifying the contextual and personal factors of domestic informal female entrepreneurs (DIFE) within the context of Turkey as a representative case of the Middle East region. The chapter takes national culture as the external context to identify the informal institutions that shape women's informal entrepreneurial activities and uses the Globe Project cultural dimensions to describe the sociocultural context. The qualitative research presented here was conducted with 38 DIFEs who participated in an EU-funded project in Turkey.

The profile of the informal domestic female entrepreneur reflects a middle-aged woman, married with children, literate with a low-level education and a necessity-type entrepreneur at the beginning who gradually evolves into a pull-type sociocultural entrepreneur in time. The findings show that, the perceived sociocultural environment can be categorized as a socially supportive culture – SSC (Hayton and Cacciotti, 2013, p. 713) which is one of the facilitators of informal entrepreneurial activities and creates a fertile and socially legitimized ground for the informal commercial activities of women in Turkey.

The purpose of this study is to seek answers to how receiving his PhD at the University of Alabama influenced the author’s ongoing academic discourse socialization as an international graduate student coming from Turkey. To that end, the author incorporates second language and academic discourse socialization theories with the concept of “desire” in TESOL.

In this autoethnographic paper, the author discusses his academic discourse socialization as an international graduate student in the form of an evocative autoethnography of socialization. The author uses data gathered through his personal memory in the form of self-reflections. Using Chang’s “chronicling the past strategy” (2008, p. 72), the author prepared a data chart, which included information regarding the data source, its mode, time, venue and stories gleaned. The author used this data chart as a self-generated document to guide him through the selection process of his personal memories in an organized way while writing mystory.

The findings show that his academic discourse socialization was mainly influenced by the attitudes of local US citizens’ and existing members of international communities in both on- and off-campus settings. Over time, his academic discourse socialization turned out to be a complex process where the author oftentimes found himself struggling to find an entry point in extracurricular conversations and interactions.

The author recommends further research to focus on the inner worlds of both old(er) timers and newcomers to understand the challenges, emotions and nuances that are at play in both L2 socialization and academic discourse socialization of international students.

In this autoethnographic study, the author offers a unique example of an international PhD student’s transnational socialization experiences. Future international students, higher education administrators, faculty members and local graduate students may learn from his autoethnography and approach their future academic relationships in a more informed way.

This study aims to investigates customer satisfaction from the use of bank chatbots and the effect of perceived trust in chatbots and banks' reputation on customer satisfaction.

A survey is conducted in Turkey involving 240 customers who experienced banking transactions using a chatbot. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) is used to investigate the relationships between the variables. The data were analyzed using SPSS 21 and SmartPLS programs.

Perceived performance, perceived trust and corporate reputation significantly affect customer satisfaction with chatbot use. Customer expectations and confirmation of customer expectations have no direct impact on customer satisfaction, but customer expectations positively affect perceived performance. Customer expectations exert an indirect influence on customer satisfaction through perceived performance. Perceived performance has a positive impact on the confirmation of customer expectations, but customer expectations do not significantly impact the confirmation of customer expectations.

This study relies on a limited number of participants. Moreover, its sample is not representative of the target population due to the convenience sampling technique. Even if the results may not be generalized to the entire population of Turkey, they reflect the reality of emerging markets with relatively high technology sensitivity and a young population.

The results provide new insights regarding banking service delivery channels, which may be of interest to professionals, academics, banks' top management, product development teams, design teams and customer satisfaction units.

This study is believed to help the community make their lives easier by providing them with knowledge and awareness about chatbots.

This study extends expectations confirmation theory's predictions to chatbot use in banking.

This study aims to shed light on women’s entrepreneurship in Turkey by focusing on the profile of women entrepreneurs, key drivers behind their decision to establish their own business, challenges they face while initiating and running their business and support mechanisms for women entrepreneurs.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted by ten successful women entrepreneurs in Turkey. Survey forms were also sent to the representatives of four different organizations that support women entrepreneurship. Three completed survey forms were received back from these organizations. Four key areas that originate from the research question (i.e. profile, drivers, problems and support mechanisms) have constituted the basis of the semi-structured interview guide and that of thematic analysis.

The results have revealed that there are important similarities among Turkish women entrepreneurs with respect to their personality traits or characteristics. Successful women entrepreneurs in Turkey were described as being persistent and determined, patient, mentally strong and visionary and innovative. The interviews also revealed that exploiting unique opportunities in the business environment, working for the good of society and being independent in one’s decisions and actions are the major factors behind Turkish women entrepreneurs’ decision to become entrepreneurs. On the other hand, finding and managing capital emerged as the most important problem for women entrepreneurs in Turkey despite the existence of various support mechanisms. Finally, the findings showed that the majority of women entrepreneurs in Turkey use traditional ways (i.e. governmental and non-governmental support mechanisms and banks) to get financial support. Family members and business partners are the other sources of financial support, which may also provide moral support to women entrepreneurs.

The generalizability of the findings is limited, as the study is exploratory, rather than causal in nature.

This study provides certain recommendations to the interested parties, such as policymakers, to create a proper economic, social, political, cultural and legal environment for women in which they can freely and willingly go into and run business.

The paper fills an important gap in the literature by systematically reviewing the extant literature on women entrepreneurship in Turkey and combining and comparing the prior findings with qualitative data derived from the interviews with ten successful women entrepreneurs.

Unlike other populations, entrepreneurs may be unable to fully escape from job-related stress due to their financial and/or psychological connection to their ventures. The authors argue that stress is a universal, intangible variable that profoundly influences the entrepreneurial process. In the present review, the authors critically synthesize past literature to evaluate the substantive body of research on stress in entrepreneurship and assess the impact of stress on individuals’ well-being. The authors find that entrepreneurial stress stems from role conflict or overload, issues related to business operations, and concerns from life outside the venture. Further, stress may result in changes to personal satisfaction and psychological well-being, contingent upon an individual’s stress tolerance, coping strategies, or recovery practices. The entrepreneurial process, from creation to exit, is comprised of several transition periods, all of which are uniquely stressful. The authors explore the implications of our findings by discussing stressors that may manifest during each stage of the entrepreneurial process. Therefore, the authors respond to calls for more dynamic investigation of entrepreneurial stress while also highlighting the need for more research into stressors associated with specific entrepreneurial activities.

This study aims to examine the colour changes affecting inkjet prints after the recycling of papers.

For recycling, papers prepared with the INGEDE 11p standard are recycled four times. Pulping, storage, flotation, beating and bleaching processes are applied for each recycling, respectively. Inkjet prints are made on the obtained test papers, and colour measurements are made using an X-Rite eXact spectrophotometer according to the ISO 13655:2017 standard. These processes are applied again to the papers which are recycled four times, and the results are analyzed. In addition, the values of ΔE₀₀ ′, ΔL′, ΔH ′ and ΔC′ are calculated according to ISO 11664-6:2014 standard by making some calculations according to obtained the L′a′b′ values.

It is determined that the ΔE₀₀ value increases after each recycling in cyan magenta and yellow colour, whereas it decreases in black. The highest ΔE₀₀ value is calculated after the fourth recycling stage is yellow with a value of 8.33. The lowest ΔE₀₀ value detected is black with a value of 0.76 after the fourth recycling stage. This paper observes that the colour with the most variation in hue angle among recycling repetitions is black and the colour with the highest hue angle value is yellow. It is seen that repeating recycling causes increase in the chromatic values of the prints.

After the fourth recycling stage, colour changes have reached an important point and can cause important printing problems. In this case, the customer’s approval must be obtained to continue printing. This case is valid for ΔE₀₀ values. Colour differences for print contrast, trapping and print chroma values are either not very important or are positive for quality.