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Wellness tourism offers opportunities for consumers to explore the self. This paper aims to explore how identity transitions occur in a liminal tourism space – a holistic wellness retreat.

The authors adopt a qualitative methodology, including in-depth semi-structured interviews supplemented by various projective techniques. Following an interpretivist approach, eight consumers were interviewed at the commencement and the completion of a holistic wellness retreat stay. Participant observation was also undertaken during the retreat programme.

The paper shows an identity transition is facilitated by the liminal space of the holistic wellness retreat and further shaped by self-work during the retreat. As participants gain new knowledge on the self and start living “consciously”, they gain a sense of vision, clarity and direction to a new self, wherein identity transition is a starting point and a process of change rather than an end goal.

While much past research views tourism activities as mainly “play”, the findings reveal the holistic wellness retreat experiences as both identity play and identity work. This paper provides theoretical insights into the process from identity play to identity work and what makes this process effective for identity transition.

In response to the emergence of a strong cross-border student flow of postgraduate students from mainland China to the Macau Special Administrative Region (Macau), this study examines the motivations and experience of a special group of doctoral students: college teachers working in Guangdong Province and simultaneously pursuing PhD degrees at private universities in Macau.

Using a qualitative research method, thirteen college teachers were interviewed.

The research findings reveal their motivations for pursuing doctoral studies in Macau, and the difficulties they faced and gains they obtained from this experience.

All the findings indicate a potential expansion of the role of Macau’s higher education system. Once merely a stepping-stone, it is now an acceleration site for brain circulation between Macau and Guangdong as part of a regionalization strategy for China’s Greater Bay Area.

This paper aims to examine the interrelationships of monetary policy's structural shocks, the real exchange rate and stock prices.

According to quarterly data, variables such as gross domestic product, consumer price index, the real exchange rate, stock price and monetary policy indices in the structural vector autoregressions model are estimated. These variables' volatility is attributed to other variables’ structural shocks separately, and analysis of variance tables for all variables is presented.

The results show that structural shock on the exchange rate does not affect the stock price, but the monetary policy's structural shock positively impacts the real exchange rate. Moreover, the real exchange rate and monetary policy's structural shocks have a negative impact on the stock price index. However, no significant effect is found pertain to the real exchange rate structural shock, statistically.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the current study model is relatively novel in developing countries, and the study sought strength to develop knowledge on the subject of the study.

This paper aims to examine critically the literature on transformational tourism and explore a research agenda for a post-COVID future.

A systematic review of the transformational tourism literature is performed over a 42-year period from 1978 to 2020.

Further research is required in terms of how transformative experiences should be calibrated and measured both in qualitative and quantitative terms, particularly from the perspective of how tourists are transformed by their experiences. Similarly, the nature and depth of these transformative processes remain poorly understood, particularly given the many different types of tourism associated with transformative experiences, which range from religious pilgrimages to backpacking and include several forms of ecotourism.

Future research directions for transformational tourism are discussed with regard to how COVID-19 will transform the dynamics of tourism and travel, including the role of new smart technologies in the creation of enhanced transformational experiences, and the changing expectations and perceptions of transformative travel in the post-COVID era. In addition, the researchers call for future studies on transformational tourism to explore the role of host communities in the delivery of meaningful visitor experiences.

Transformational tourism is an emerging body of research, which has attracted a growing level of interest among tourism scholars in recent years. However, to this date, a systematic review of published literature in this field has not been conducted yet in a holistic sense. This paper offers a framework for future research in this field.

It is more and more clear to me that the final question in regard to values, which is to say the final question in one's interpretation of life and the universe, is this which I have tried to focus in the epigrammatic phrase “such that.” Is the inner nature of things – especially of people – “given” in such a sense that all their doings and manifestations are but the “expression” or “manifestation” of a given inner nature, that what they do in the broadest sense follows inevitably from [w]hat they are at the moment of the doing? Or on the other hand is there “more” to than that? Is there a margin of choosing to be one thing or another, or choosing to do in a sense which involves choosing to be, as well as expression or manifestation of what one already is? It is the essential message or point of Bergson's philosophy. Cf. also B. Russell, Analysis of Mind, and Seman's work to which he refers. Russell inclines to the view that what a person or animal does expresses what he is, exactly and completely, but admits it is an assumption, unprovable. He is no fool. He also admits that what one is at any moment depends within widest limits on his history, but assumes also that this unfolds according to law, that the changes which one's nature undergoes in any experience or act are also an expression of and theoretically predictable from what one's nature was the moment before and the conditions surrounding the experience or act. But he recognizes that this also is an unprovable assumption.

This study aims to examine how leadership identity manifests at the individual and collective levels within a relational training context among a group of multicultural higher education students.

This is a case study and examines the interactions among eight multicultural students through the theoretical lens of leadership identity development (LID) theory.

The main findings of this study suggest that LID manifests through an open will and intensifying motivation to the collective impulse of achieving shared goals through nurturing the collective cognition to integrate diverse perspectives and a broadening view of leadership as a collective capacity for co-creation and generativity.

Although the paper builds on a case study with a limited number of participants and the ability to generalise its findings is partial, the study may provide practical applications for training leadership in other collaborative contexts and supporting it at the individual and collective levels.

The LID theory and LID model have been applied simultaneously to a training lab to examine how LID manifests among a multicultural group of higher education students. The lab emphasises a participatory leadership-oriented pedagogy.

This paper explores some social‐psychological aspects of South Asian young adults in Denmark, including identity processes through social relations across geographical borders and psychological diaspora consciousness, and is a follow‐up of a project conducted in the mid‐nineties, in Denmark (N = 14). Diasporic conceptualisations focusing on human‐centredness and processes in migration, combined with a lifecourse perspective, provide the theoretical framework for this study. The method used is in‐depth interviews, analysed through condensation and meaningful categorisation of the narratives. The young adults are perceived as active actors in relation to their life situation. The results show the young adults', as well as the parental generations', re‐interpretation of the self, other and home. They also show that the young adults' diasporic identities involve the countries of origin as well as the Scandinavian welfare societies. However, the myth of return is not supported, although the countries of residence have adopted increasingly restrictive migration policies in the past years.

The aim of this paper is to reveal these problems and to derive recommendations for improvement. In the field of alcohol use disorders (AUDs), two common complaints are the large treatment gap that exists because only a small percentage of people with an AUD are in treatment; and the prolonged lag that typically exists between the emergence of problematic symptoms and actual on set of treatment. However, there also are no clear definitions for these terms – “treatment gap” and “treatment lag” – and, therefore, no consensus regarding how to quantify them. For this reason, it is difficult to compare the results of studies assessing either of these measures.

A non-systematic literature search and logical-analytical investigation was performed of immanent problems related to definitions and measurements aiming to enhance understanding in this area and derive suggestions for improvement.

The following four fundamental questions were identified: How does one operationalise the need to change substance use behaviours? Which interventions can justifiably be called treatment? Is treatment always necessary? and How regularly do patients need to be in contact with a treatment system to be considered “in treatment”? Potential approaches to answering these questions are discussed and recommendations made for future studies to determine how the treatment gap and treatment lag should be derived.

The derived recommendations should make the calculation of treatment gap and treatment lag more transparent and comparable between studies. They also may serve as checklists for future studies on the treatment gap and lag in the AUD field.

Through many years of study, we have found that cold quantum is the most important force in nature. Under the pressure of coldness on hotness, various materials are formed. Under the pressure of cold quantum, these materials are provided with gravity, and celestial bodies start to move. The pressure of cold quantum exists in space and materials. It is the pressure of cold quantum that huge changes between the four seasons on the earth begin to appear. The whirlpool, produced from the cold quantum pressure, pushes all the celestial bodies making them turn and change. The coldness converts frozen water into ice, which could not be achieved by any other force. The extreme and powerful strength of cold quantum has been well‐known. Therefore, we claim that the cold quantum pressure is the greatest force which ever existed in the universe.

Migration shapes our societies, values, markets, consumption and even the notion of self. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of migration in the perception-of-self and if differences in the perception-of-self influence the perception of brands from the immigrants’ home country – which immigrants often use as a cultural anchor.

Using Aaker’s (1997) brand personality scale as a measure of brand image, the authors gather data from Mexico City and the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolitan area. Respondents to an interviewer-administered questionnaire were asked to evaluate the brand image of two TV media Mexican brands and their perception-of-self based on Aaker’s 42 brand personality traits.

The results of this paper indicate that the perception-of-self is different for Latinos residing in their home country and immigrant Latinos living abroad. Further, these differences in the perception-of-self appear to influence the way immigrants perceive brands from their home country.

Brands from emerging markets making inroads into developed markets, targeting their country’s diasporas as their first target group, should understand whether people’s perception-of-self differs significantly from their home country counterparts, the direction of such a difference and the effect of such differences on the perceptions of brands from their home country.

This paper is a contribution to the brand personality, brand image and self literature and presents an innovative approach to analyzing the possible brand image implications of the expansion of multinational companies and immigration.