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This paper aims to present the host experience of student hosts in Hong Kong, a popular educational destination for international students from mainland China and other countries. This study examines the interconnection between the experience-based and sociocultural dimensions of visiting friends and relatives (VFR) travel, considering the overall host experience, the host–guest relationship and post-hosting changes in perception of both the VFR experience and destination.

This research adopts a qualitative approach to compare the experience-based and sociocultural dimensions of VFR travel considering international university students as VFR hosts in Hong Kong, taking a student sample from both mainland Chinese and overseas students. Based on a voluntary sampling approach, the research team had face-to-face interviews with the students that agreed to participate. The interviews were conducted voluntarily and anonymously and included those students who had hosted any friends or relatives in the past 12 months. A total of 26 interviews were successfully completed, including 10 mainland Chinese and 16 non-mainland Chinese students.

The results confirm that the VFR host experience is generally shaped by an integration of internal characteristics (sociocultural characteristics of both hosts and visitors) and external environment (urban infrastructure and tourism resources). The two groups distinctively express their host experience that shows some areas of cultural barriers and geographical proximity.

The limitations of this research mainly lie on its relatively small sample size because of constraints in accessing the contact information of international students across universities. These shortcomings should be improved by adopting a research design that uses other sampling approaches, such as snowball sampling, to include a wider scope of students from different local universities, or convenience sampling, to interview and compare responses of international students from various educational destinations. Alternative data sources may be considered, for example, through user-generated contents from online and social media platforms that contain sharing of students as hosts.

The geographical and cultural proximities influence VFR tourism development and social construction of values and the consequent hosting behaviour. The unique role of international students should be further explored, especially in the Asian context. The outcome of VFR travel must be evaluated and studied more from cultural and personal dimensions than economic gain, which should be relevant to host perspective such as improved quality of life, social ties and place attachment and psychological benefits. The changing risk perception caused by the COVID-19 pandemic may be examined through some forms of travel intention.

Firstly, the destination marketing organisations of the educational destination should address the difficulty faced by student hosts in terms of external attributes such as local culture, urban infrastructure, tourism resources and information accessibility. Secondly, to target the hosts, some specific VFR-related products and services may be developed for international students through local tertiary institutions such that the role of hosts as ambassadors can be facilitated and enhanced. Thirdly, the functional role of international students can be distinctive based on their unique network, activities and knowledge constructed upon learning during the period of education.

The studentification of many educational destination cities, the dynamism of the role of international students as VFR hosts and their cultural differences between places of origin have provided an opportunity for deepening the understanding of VFR tourism.

This chapter is focused in a methodological frame to study the practices of entrepreneurial agents and the startups in nontechnological sectors in the middle-income countries. The startup of ideas involves three phases that comprise the first life cycle of a possible company considering too sociocultural aspects as external factors implied in the creation, prototype, and entry to markets. In Latin America, the type of risks experienced by companies in their early stages of life and incubation are not known in a timely manner. The lack of information on entrepreneurship and its agents in countries such as Mexico also inhibits visualization of heterogeneity of contexts to business development, and how some regions are more propensity to boost startups than others, in different sectorial and branches of knowledge. Mexico like rest countries in Latin America has a high percentage of SMEs focused in sectors that are innovative but not are participating in the last technological waves. For this reason, it is necessary to know how these agents prepare, manage, and apply entrepreneurship in accordance with institutional, technological, and sociocultural dispositions to structure their experiences and make more vigorous the territorial entrepreneurial. Small and medium businesses are building new paths taking advantage of territorial and cultural opportunities. Applying the framework proposed in the last part of this chapter is presented a case of study of an entrepreneur oriented to craft brewer production in Tijuana, Mexico.

Given the changing work force demographics and the increased globalization of businesses, the usage of a multidimensional construct to assess racioethnic differences in job‐related attitudes and behaviors may be able to provide researchers and practitioners with a better understanding of how to more effectively manage diverse individuals within various organizational contexts. As such, it is purported that racioethnicity is multidimensional, with at least three dimensions: physioethnicity, the physical dimension; socioethnicity, the sociocultural dimension; and psychoethnicity, the psychological dimension. It is further posited that examining socioethnicity and psychoethnicity, in addition to physioethnicity, will enable researchers and practitioners to assess the sociocultural and psychological dimensions of racioethnicity and their affects on various organizational behavioral outcomes, which have traditionally been ignored.

COVID-19 is having a significant impact on the world. Not only attacking the health sector, but the effect of this pandemic is also rooting in all industries. Several states are struggling with an economic recession within several months. Indonesia is one of the countries which experiences the economic downturn shown by the increase in the number of poverties, unemployment, and laid-off workers. While struggling with these issues, both government and Indonesian society should work together to prevent the economic recession. This research aims to capture the impact of social awareness by the community to slow down the pandemic’s effect. Social awareness as a snapshot of the neighborhood reinforcement method (NRM) is used to measure the program’s impact. This research is conducted in a subsidized housing community in Malang. Using structural equation model, this study attempts to measure five different aspects, including (i) economic aspects, (ii) human aspects, (iii) sociocultural aspects, (iv) political aspects, and (v) protection aspects. The result shows a different impact on each element, both positively or negatively.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights for educators when adapting their pedagogy to suit the increasingly diverse international student body.

Archival analysis was conducted at three levels: students’ teaching style preference; epistemology of the students’ home culture; and national sociocultural dimensions.

The study elucidates the importance of recognizing heterogeneity rather than homogeneity of the increasingly international student body. It extends understanding of sociocultural underpinnings of different student learning styles and encourages educators to increase their cultural empathy to adapt their pedagogy.

This paper helps forge the way to a truly global learning environment. Understanding, adapting to and celebrating the differences among international students helps to create more inclusive learning about our global community.

The purpose of this study is to assess differences between the adjustment of expatriates in Germany and France. Most research has focused on the individual in relation to expatriate adjustment. The general conditions of the host country, however, could represent an important contextual factor that needs to be explored further.

Based on an empirical study of 130 expatriate managers on foreign assignments in France (61) and Germany (69), the authors take a comparative perspective and examine differences for sociocultural and psychological adjustment as well as time to proficiency in both countries.

The authors found that expatriates assigned to France show higher degrees of work adjustment and general adjustment than those in Germany. This was unexpected as Germany is generally described as a more transparent, open and welcoming country. Results may thus challenge stereotypical conceptions of national differences and indicate that globalization processes are gradually changing country-specific conditions.

Only scant research has dealt with expatriates adjusting to Western European countries and no other studies have compared the adjustment of expatriates in Germany and France.

Cities were regions ruled by local governments, where people were supposed to live together and provide equal access to sociocultural opportunities. In the 21st century, global warming and overuse of scarce limited resources has made sustainability more examined about for our entire environment, particularly cities. With the rapid increase in the population in the cities, humankind has faced a lot of pollution, destruction, and social inequality. Many regions and countries have started to build new smart cities using technology to overcome crowded life, traffic, and air pollution, improve food production, and use scarce natural resources sustainable. Smart cities also provide residents to improve their quality of life and their health; therefore, eco-gastronomy is related to organic farming and cooking method that minimize the damage to the environment with organic ingredients. For a healthy and quality life, meals made with healthy ingredients are required. Smart cities have also started to implement eco-gastronomy projects by using technology. In this chapter, cities which can be associated with the eco-gastronomy dimension of smart cities such as Gaziantep, Izmir, and Konya from Turkey and Copenhagen were analyzed.

Structural equation modelling (SEM) has increasingly been used by hospitality and tourism researchers to examine complex relationships. This paper aims to highlight the benefits and limitations of SEM for hospitality and tourism research and compare its two main approaches, i.e. covariance-based SEM (CB-SEM) and partial least squares-SEM (PLS-SEM).

By using a comparative approach, this study parallels SEM’s two main approaches, i.e. CB-SEM and PLS-SEM, using three different examples from hospitality and tourism industry. Both the approaches are compared side by side in terms of assumptions, validity and reliability of measurement models, item retention and loadings, strength and significance of path relationships and coefficient of determinations.

The findings show that even though both methods analyse measurement theory and structural path models, there are relatively higher advantages for hospitality and tourism researchers in applying PLS-SEM.

Because of the limitations of only using three examples, the results and trends generated in this study may not be generalized to all research in hospitality and tourism discipline. Moreover, the Likert scale has been used to measure the constructs in both the studies, which may have biased the results.

This study is the first to compare the usage of both the SEM approaches in hospitality and tourism research. The findings of this study provide significant implications and directions for hospitality and tourism researchers to apply PLS-SEM in the future.

A sample of 343 Western business expatriates assigned to Hong Kong responded to a mail survey regarding usage of corporate career development activities and their extent of international adjustment. Although such activities are targeted at the job and its context, there was no (positive) association as anticipated between career development activities and work adjustment of the expatriates. Instead, there was a significant positive relation between these activities and psychological adjustment, as measured by subjective well‐being. Implications for globalizing corporations of these findings are discussed in detail.