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This paper aims to highlight the possibility that the same cultural and/or institutional environment can differentially affect each of the two moments of entrepreneurship – opportunity identification and opportunity exploitation. It is possible that the cultural and institutional environment in a particular place may encourage opportunity identification, but discourage opportunity exploitation, or vice versa. Specifically, this paper argues that understanding entrepreneurship in Trinidad and Tobago requires that we focus on how Trinidadian culture and institutions differentially affect both moments of entrepreneurship.

To examine how Trinidad and Tobago’s culture and institutions affect entrepreneurial opportunity identification and exploitation in that country, the paper uses a qualitative approach. In total, 25 subjects agreed to interviews, conducted in July and August 2009 in Trinidad. The questions were geared at understanding attitudes toward work and entrepreneurship in Trinidad, and how politics, culture and ethnicity interacted with those attitudes. The paper also examined institutional indicators from the Economic Freedom of the World: 2013 Annual Report and the World Bank’s 2016 Doing Business Report.

The research identified features of the cultural and institutional environment in Trinidad and Tobago that help to explain why opportunity identification is relatively common among all ethnic groups there, but why opportunity exploitation appears relatively suppressed among African–Trinidadians. In particular, the research finds that the inheritance of British institutions, a post-colonial political culture, a post-colonial business culture and ethnically based social networks all have positive and negative influences on each moment of entrepreneurship.

Further research would involve an analysis of a wider set of both formal and informal entrepreneurial activities in Trinidad and Tobago, across industries and periods.

This paper has implications for understanding the complex nature of entrepreneurship, which many policymakers try to encourage, but which is shaped by deep cultural and historical factors, and also indirectly influenced by state policies and laws.

Ethnic patterns in entrepreneurship shape the way groups see themselves and others.

While authors writing about opportunity recognition/identification and opportunity exploitation have captured the important dimensions of entrepreneurship, they underestimate the possibility of a disconnect between entrepreneurial identification and exploitation. Focusing on instances where the disconnect exists allows us to move away from characterizations of cultures as progress-prone or progress-resistant, and instead allows us to focus on these gaps between identifying and exploiting entrepreneurship across cultures.

There exists a significant literature detailing the role of voluntary associations as important actors in mitigating forms of marginalisation under austerity. However, neglected in this literature is the role that such voluntary associations can play in forming and deploying “symbolic power” to fight post-colonial, cultural forms of marginalisation. This is important, especially given conditions where material forms of fighting marginalisation are limited by austerity. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper employs a case study analysis, drawing on data collected during fieldwork and through archival research in France. This methodology allows for the investigation of the multitude of ways by which this association utilises post-colonial symbols to fight marginalisation.

This paper finds that under conditions of austerity, the case study of this association demonstrates three important themes of analysis. First, the association, while not receiving funds outright from municipal authorities, actually is granted privileged access to municipal resources and is given significant personal support from local politicians. This support facilitates the second and third inter-related themes of analysis – namely the abilities to fight marginalisation using history and public culture.

This paper seeks to clarify this role of voluntary associations in the important field of “symbolic power” (Bourdieu, 1990) through the use of cultural and historical symbols from a colonial/post-colonial repertoire in France.

With its worldwide fame for making action films, Hong Kong cinema has been defined as masculine. Action films, including the costumed martial arts films and the modern gangster films, have been a major genre in Hong Kong cinema from the 1960s on. Despite the dominant masculinity, women still play significant roles in some of these films. In fact, fighting women leave footprints in the history of Hong Kong cinema, which precede their counterparts in the West and even provide models for Hollywood after 2000.

This chapter focuses on the female characters portrayed by the acclaimed Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai, whose works have an ambiguous connection to mainstream genres. He modifies Hong Kong action films and creates unconventional female characters such as the drug dealer in Chungking Express (1994), the killer dispatcher in Fallen Angels (1995), the swordswoman in Ashes of Time (1994), and the kung fu master in The Grandmaster (2013). Wong's films have been mush discussed in academia, but the gender images therein are quite ignored. With high intertextuality, these characters are used to question mainstream action films and redefine women's roles in male's cinematic space. In addition, via the writing of these women, Wong constructs an open and ambivalent post-colonial Hong Kong identity. This paper contextualises the figures of sword-wielding and gun-shooting women and examines how Wong Kar-wai deploys these images to articulate the cultural identity of a post-colonial city.

While sharing fundamental similarities with other colonial and post-colonial experiences, Latin America has a unique history of having been the proving ground for early Spanish and Portuguese imperial projects, of having experienced a relatively long duration of – but also historically early end to – these projects, and of negotiating a particular and complex trajectory of internal and external post-colonial relations. What can the study of this distinct colonial and post-colonial experience contribute to a broader program of postcolonial sociology? Conversely, what can a revitalized postcolonial sociology contribute to the study of Latin America? This article develops provisional answers to these questions by reviewing major currents in South and North American scholarship on the Latin American colonial and post-colonial experience. Some of this scholarship self-consciously identifies with broader movements in postcolonial studies; but much of it – both historical and contemporary – does not. By bringing together diverse strands of thought, this article sheds new light on what postcolonialism means in the Latin American context, while using the comparative leverage that this set of often overlooked cases provides to contribute to a new program of postcolonial sociology.

Witchcraft in Honduras is an unprotected marginalized woman’s efforts to gain social, economic, and political power through an informal economy by utilizing the cultural belief in the witches’ supernatural power. The Honduran post-colonial Latin American culture allows for a persistent informal economy, in part, based on the commoditization of witchcraft and exorcism. The case study provides a specific example through ethnographic interviews of this under-researched informal economy driven by fear and economic desperation. Further research and analysis of these poorly understood and rarely recorded modern phenomena and the associated informal economy is needed.

Established educational leadership discourse has been dominated by Anglo‐American perspectives oblivious to the cultural diversity that characterizes the contemporary world. It has frequently privileged mono‐cultural, mainstream values which have meant indigenous and ethnic groups have suffered alienation, exclusion and disadvantage. Western‐led educational interventions in developing nations also frequently fail to acknowledge the rich cultural traditions of recipient societies and theories and practice are rarely appropriately scrutinized for “cultural fit”. The purpose of this paper is to construct a theory for leadership in intercultural contexts.

The article reviews how monocultural assumptions of colonial and national leadership cultures in the past were frequently inappropriate for the diverse populations they were intended to serve. The global era has witnessed the emergence of cross‐cultural theory and research paradigms to combat cultural blindness and develop cultural sensitivities. While applauding these developments, the epistemological assumptions that underlie such research are questioned. A case for more nuanced theory, which acknowledges complex interactions between agents from different cultures, is developed. This includes a call for more dynamic research tools based upon constructivist and phenomenological premises.

Cross‐cultural research has generated territorial maps that promote insight and mutual understandings. However, it relies upon essentialist stereotypes that mask the existence of complex sub‐cultures and dynamic forces of change within national cultures. Case study research which taps the subjective understandings of cultural actors is cited to reveal a more complex process of interaction between cultural agents.

This is a theoretical exploration, not an empirical report. It is limited by the scarcity of existing research in a fledgling field.

The article encourages researchers to move from observationally based, stereotypical portraits to more nuanced concepts of cultures as complex, multi‐layered and changing phenomena. It establishes the epistemological foundations for future research in inter‐cultural contexts.

The paper develops new directions for future theory and research.

Currently, urban social movement studies pay much attention to the emergence of ‘new’ anti-racist and post-colonial transnational urban protest networks and protest formations. Drawing on ethnographic research, I illustrate such developments with reference to autonomous/anarchist Left-wing urban protest in Vienna during the last decade. I thereby combine (Neo-)Marxist critical urban theory and the discursive and cultural studies' inspired approach of radical democracy. I argue that this perspective on urban protest allows for an integrated analysis of its material and discursive groundings. Such an approach would point to material/ist, spatial and cultural aspects of urban protest politics and could thus be fruitful for further discussion, political analysis and political action.

The Sri Lanka Telecommunications company was recently partially privatised and a major Japanese company became responsible for its management. Previously, it was a government department characterised by rule bound, bureaucratic management and political interventions into operational issues. The longitudinal study illustrates how a Japanese manager's charismatic and patrimonial leadership eliminated bureaucratic controls, brought new management controls and reward systems, and achieved some commercial success. However, some employees unsympathetic to the changes allied with politicians frustrated with their exclusion from organisational affairs to get the Japanese manager removed and restore formal bureaucracy. This was achieved not through direct intervention but largely through the politicians' control of the regulatory system. Conflicts between the two competing management control ideologies were profound and violent. The paper traces how modes of production and management accounting and controls in less developed countries are related, and are transformed in an unpredictable and often unexpected fashion due to cultural, economic, and political factors.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss stigma and insensitive communication surrounding mental illness discourse amongst adolescents in the Polokwane Local Municipality against the background of a Foucauldian lens.

The literature reviewed included a discussion of perspectives on stigma and insensitive communication, contextualisation of the dual health–belief system in South Africa and the Foucauldian governmentality theoretical perspective. The methodology was based on a Foucauldian orientation and Geertz’ interpretivism. The methods followed to analyse the discourse were Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA), coupled with Geertz' “thick description.” The data were collected from six focus group discussions, which consisted of a total of 36 informants.

The findings indicated the dominance of the biomedicine discourse, neoliberal rationalisations for self-care and the policy of deinstitutionalisation.

The implications for practice using an FDA approach combined with an interpretivist stance exposes the actions, institutions, possibilities for action whilst understanding core beliefs in a complex dual health and religious belief setting. The addition of Geertz’s interpretivism adds a cultural flare and insight, which adds to the depth of the analysis.

The complexity of beliefs, experiences and health choices calls for culturally sensitive discourse about mental illness and also highlights how discourse about individual conduct and self-care is embedded in the discourse used by adolescents.