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This paper aims to present a conceptual account of how organizational members collectively contribute to establishing workable communication models in contexts of linguistic and cultural diversity.

The study draws on existing theory and empirical studies related to cultural diversity and workplace communication to analyze how meaning is continually co-negotiated.

The pressure to interact efficiently with team members with different language and cultural backgrounds leads to the foregrounding of certain strategies and organizational dynamics that facilitate viable communication.

The ways in which language and cultural diversity can be transcended through the use of appropriate communication strategies, resulting in organizational unity and consistency, should be a central concern in the scholarly research agenda on organizations.

Workforces worldwide, including virtual workforces, are increasingly required to work in culturally diverse teams and in a dominant language not shared as a first language by all employees; the preliminary study of one highly diverse workforce reveals issues that are generalizable to other geographical contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to report an initial investigation into the role of national citizenship status in relation to leadership and organizational innovation in the context of the United Arab Emirates, an Arabian Gulf country with a workforce in which migrants far outweigh the number of locals.

The authors use grounded theory methodology to gather initial data and reveal potentially appropriate theory for further research into the role of national citizenship as it correlates with organizational innovation.

The dominant themes that emerged were that citizen leaders display high levels of willingness to deviate from organizational schemata to respond to new situations; a preference for focus on the big picture; and low monitoring of subordinates. These findings indicate that citizen leaders experience greater ease in diverging from organizational schemata, suggesting that national citizenship status may afford a freedom that enhances the potential to contribute to organizational innovation.

The issue of national citizenship is clearly one of increasing significance in the global workplace and, therefore, must be added to the academic research agenda given the combination of more frequent worldwide professional migration and the growing imperative of organizational innovation. To this end, the authors suggest potentially useful frameworks for further study.

This pioneering research has applicability to other geopolitical regions with high numbers of migrants in their workforces.

This conceptual paper aims to respond to the dearth of theory and mechanisms for handling the inherent ethereality, multiplicity and mutability of organisational identity and organisational image.

This study considers existing approaches to organisational identity noting the diverse understandings of the paradoxical nature of identity. The authors suggest that identity is still essentially perceived as what is core and enduring about the character of an organisation with changes of identity being viewed as occurrences effectuated by events. In contrast, the authors argue that, because of the fluid interrelationships between identity and image, organisational identity is better viewed as an unstable construct.

Departing from Bakhtin’s logic of dialogism, this study proposes that identity–image result from dialogic relationships which in turn construct a system of polyphony. This study devises a preliminary polyphonic model which has the capacity to incorporate diverse stakeholder associations and fluctuating interpretations as well as situational understandings of organisational messages.

This study’s proposed model allows to trace how organisational identity–image is continually co-constructed recursively and cyclically and to systematise the various voices that are important for an organisation’s strategic objectives.

The aim of this study is to conduct an initial investigation of information sharing between the vast number of expatriate employees and the small minority of local employees in Dubai’s private sector workforce. Research on the impact of the workforce localization policy has highlighted the frequent marginalization of locals within the expatriate-dominated private sector. One form of this is the reluctance of expatriates to share information with local recruits, and the authors conducted this study to assess the reality and extent of this phenomenon.

The authors designed a brief interview survey to probe how Emirati employees secure workplace information and whether they experience information withholding on the part of expatriate colleagues. The authors also explored whether any such experience impacts on their attitudes to working in the private sector since this is a key factor in the success of the localization policy. Complete responses were received from 0.9 per cent of the total local private sector workforce.

A notable lack of information sharing emerged with 58 per cent of respondents reporting their expatriate colleagues’ and superiors’ reluctance to share information with them, and 63 per cent describing experiences of discriminatory behavior.

The authors identify key cultural and communication issues relating to localization within Dubai’s multicultural workforce. These include the broader cultural factors that determine how Emiratis conceptualize information sharing. Future research can pursue this issue to help inform the development of supportive information sharing practices. Such practices are an essential part of the creation of a diversity climate, which is necessary to sustain localization.

This study is a pioneering attempt to empirically investigate the information sharing practices that Emirati private sector employees experience. It suggests that the exclusion of citizens from the workplace through practices such as “ghost Emiratization” reverberates in the workplace through a lack of information sharing.

This paper aims to present an exploration of possible associations between the Jungian archetypes frequently used in marketing and three well-known products based on artificial intelligence (AI), namely, Sophia, Alexa and Articoolo.

The study conducted emotionalist interviews to gather thick data from 11 participants on how they conceptualize these AI-based products. In the absence of any existing relevant hypotheses, this paper attempts to build theory using a case study approach and qualitative analysis of interview narratives.

Despite the human attributes ascribed to these products, participants were principally concerned with their purpose, efficiency and the degree of trust which they felt could be accorded to the product. Anthropomorphism emerged as significant with participants making some associations with common archetypes traditionally exploited in marketing and this suggests a possible means of enhancing consumer trust in AI products.

Little research has been conducted on the marketing of AI and this study presents a timely identification of some potentially significant issues. As AI is intended to mimic some aspects of human intelligence, the role of the archetype in creating a personality to enhance trust may prove crucial in securing consumer confidence.

The purpose of this study is to explore the concept that expatriate status, as opposed to national citizen status, may impact leader behavior. The intention is not to pursue a research question carved out from the expatriation and leadership research streams but rather to raise the issue of non-citizenship status as potentially moderating leader behavior.

The authors used grounded theory methodology, including interviews to gather data on the behavior of non-citizen leaders in the UAE. The resulting 28 interview transcripts were analyzed using inductive coding to arrive at aggregate theoretical dimensions.

Their findings reveal a keen tendency among expatriate leaders to display organizational legitimacy by remaining sedulously within established organizational schemata and monitoring employees closely.

The study asks, rather than answers, a question and does not use an established theoretical framework, as its area of concern is not one that fits solely within the literatures on expatriation, international business, leadership, cross-cultural management or national citizenship. Furthermore, the context in which they conduct our investigation is the UAE whose workforce has a disproportionately high number of expatriates. Although this serves as a convenient context in which to study the rising occurrence of non-citizen leaders due to increased professional migration, the issue may be more meaningfully tested in geopolitical contexts with typical expatriate–citizen workforce ratios.

The central theoretical contribution of this preliminary study is to provide initial empirical evidence suggesting that the hitherto-ignored variable of national citizenship may be a significant one to address given increasing professional global migration.

This paper reports an exploration of changing the legitimacy judgments of Emirati women employees in the UAE’s public sector. This paper aims to fill the research gap on gender at employee, rather than managerial level, a topic that has already generated considerable research.

Data derived from semi-structured interviews with 29 Emirati women working in the public sector is analyzed using NVivo 12 to identify their attitudes to, and experience of, participating in the workforce.

Interview narratives reveal that women not only consider that they have the right to enhanced professional status but also view this as exerting a positive impact on their personal lives.

It is suggested that this emerging sense of entitlement to work may be traced to the early political endorsement of women in the UAE workforce, underscoring the value of political and judicial agendas that contribute to female legitimacy and their rigorous implementation.

This study highlights the imperative of political goodwill and equitable legislation, as well as the need to assess Islamic values versus patriarchal biases in relation to women in the workforce.

This paper aims to adopt the “simple rules” approach developed by Sull and Eisenhardt (2016) and apply it to explain how corporate social responsibility (CSR) manifests in myriad ways depending on the particular socio-economic and geopolitical context.

It illustrates the implicit principle of “simple rules” through the case of a major petroleum company in the United Arab Emirates (Emirates National Oil Company [ENOC]) using content analysis to trace its interpretation and practice of CSR as transmitted via its social media platforms and stakeholder response.

ENOC’s CSR is primarily associated with two government objectives. One relates to human resource initiatives, most especially to the development of local talent in response to the government’s priority of reducing the country’s excessive reliance on expatriate labor. The second is that of preserving local heritage which is reflected in the prominence of local religious values in its posts. The prioritization of these two key themes is a manifestation of how, from the vast range of activities that can be considered as constituting CSR, an individual company chooses those that serve local and immediate intentions.

A tight scoping of CSR within cherished national objectives appears to enhance the co-creation of shared value between company and stakeholders.

This study’s contribution does not so much problematize the many classifications and theories developed to account for diverse conceptualizations and implementations of CSR; rather, it proposes a “simple rules” approach as a parallel and potentially efficient, economical means to explain diversity within CSR interpretation and execution according to the specific geopolitical and socio-economic context in which it is implemented.

This paper aims to investigate the potential effectiveness of using corporate social marketing (CSM) as part of an advertising campaign targeting local Muslim consumers in Dubai. It aims to assess whether Dubai’s local Muslim community’s construal of corporate commitment has evolved beyond philanthropy toward receptiveness to a more embedded corporate societal engagement.

The examination is based on the framework of corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication that postulates a relationship between internal outcomes, such as the awareness of a cause, and external outcomes, such as the likelihood that a consumer will purchase a product. The authors designed a questionnaire using authentic advertisements for the same product, one with a CSM message and one without, and queried respondents’ opinions of the advertisements, their willingness to purchase the product and their perceptions of the company. Complete responses were collected from 245 Emirati women.

Significant differences in response to the CSM versus the non-CSM advertisement emerged. The product advertised via the CSM strategy engendered enhanced perceptions of the company among respondents, coupled with a heightened willingness on their part to purchase the product. This indicates that Emirati consumers have gone beyond the simple expectation of philanthropy, which is frequently associated with Muslim consumer loyalty, and value more evolved corporate social commitment.

While Muslim groups have been investigated extensively from various marketing perspectives, the present study is the first to investigate the impact of incorporating CSR into an authentic advertising campaign targeted at Muslim consumers.

Diverse cultural contexts with their distinct enactments of traditional gender inequity present unique constraints for female leaders. In Western contexts, the Christianity-inspired principle of equality of all humans remains a latent principle operative toward greater gender egalitarianism. This paper aims to examine female leaders within an Islamic context devoid of such espoused equality in which gender differences are enshrined in culture and law.

Questionnaires based on the Competing Value Framework were developed and completed by 145 leaders and 365 employees from UAE companies. The salient findings of these responses were explored in six subsequent focus group discussions.

The study reveals no difference in how women perform leadership, except in terms of brokering skills in which women are perceived as superior to their male counterparts. Focus group discussion participants ascribed this difference to the Islamic benevolent sexism dynamic of according women greater respect, which facilitates their access to higher management.

This pioneering perspective of female leaders in a context of overt and sanctioned cultural and legal gender disparity contributes to scholarship on female leadership through a non-Western lens.