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The construct of “tradition” is commonly used in studies of society and culture and refers to historically patterned institutionalized practices that emphasize the “presentness of the past” in their transmission. However, there is “very little analysis of the properties of tradition” (Shils, 1971, p. 124), especially in the management literature. We draw on illustrative examples from Martha Stewart Living magazine to reveal the use and meanings of traditions and their relevance to understanding institutional micro-foundations in contemporary living. We investigate how organizations bundle various aspects of institutions in their presentation, and seek to advance theory on how institutions matter in everyday life.

Purpose – The present study addresses: First, which traditions are currently lived in the Swiss Armed Forces? Second, which traditions are viewed in positive or negative terms and why is this so? And finally, which traditions have disappeared and which are wished for?

Methodology/approach – Two separate surveys were conducted by the authors of this study in an attempt to answer these questions. For the first survey, qualitative interviews were conducted with 50 professional and militia military commanders in order to get the internal perspective. For the second survey, a representative sample of 1,200 Swiss voters was interviewed in an attempt to get the external perspective.

Findings – The main findings show that there are few formal traditions in the Swiss Armed Forces. The republican self-concept and the decentralized political system in Switzerland have significantly influenced the meaning of traditions and their practice. Moreover, traditions mainly serve to integrate cadres and soldiers into the military. The majority of traditions is informal or a combination of formal (top-down) and informal (bottom-up) traditions. Lost traditions not only fell victim to structural changes, but their purpose was also questioned by commanders. Two major military reforms as well as societal change are the main reasons for the disappearance of traditions in the Swiss Armed Forces. The results show a high degree of congruence with the qualitative survey. In short, the Swiss population generally views military traditions in favorable terms. In particular, it endorses traditions that serve to foster a sense of community and impart knowledge. However, traditions that stress manhood and bravery are strongly rejected.

Research limitations/implications – The approach could be applied to other cases. Case studies may be generalized in a conceptual sense.

Originality/value of paper – Case study with broader practical and research implications, invites international comparative research.

In this study, we analyze sport as a cultural product of a particular place. We use the concept of “tradition” to highlight the collective (as opposed to individual) aspects of sport, emphasizing the importance of temporality, emergence, and novelty in social processes. We conducted a case study of internationally successful Icelandic men’s team handball that provides an interesting topic in this respect. Our findings challenge decades of research on sport that has stressed innate talent, individual qualities or physiological processes rather than the sociocultural processes. They support the interactionist approach to culture showing how local culture, rooted in specific interaction settings, influences the formation and development of a successful sport tradition. It is the way that cultural elements interact and combine in various networks that is crucial for national variations in playing sport. The social processes involved are best captured by Mead’s concepts of emergence, novelty, and the principle of sociality. These concepts help us to explain how unique national styles of playing sports derive from general cultural and social mechanism that interact to produce emergent and novel national variations. Our findings also support and extend earlier work on craftsmanship indicating that crafts-work, which is a part of an organized community resembling the old “workshop,” explains in part how innovations originate in sport-specific and other local networks. These theories offer a sociological extension of pragmatic theories of learning, emphasizing the group in the tradition of Mead.

Christmas is the most consumed event of the year, always full of traditions, namely family ones, which are very significant. In this way, it is intended to find out the importance of traditions at Christmas time and analyze their implications for family businesses.

The study is quantitative in nature, based on a questionnaire survey carried out with 551 Portuguese individuals, over 18 years of age, where different issues related to Christmas traditions and family are addressed.

The results demonstrate that the Christmas traditions scale is made up of four factors: family traditions on Christmas Eve, aspects related to the Christmas spirit, changes in Christmas traditions with the COVID-19 pandemic and traditions of participating in events with family at Christmas. Cod and octopus dishes are the most popular dishes on Christmas Eve. In relation to sweets/desserts, king cake, rabanadas, vermicelli, children's bread and sponge cake are the most common on Christmas Eve.

The study helps to understand Portuguese Christmas traditions, providing knowledge that allows defining strategies for family businesses, improving the experience and relationship with consumers at a special time of year. It is hoped that the trends in Christmas traditions in this study will contribute to unveiling the Christmas spirit, also serve as a marketing image and create curiosity and motivation on the part of other cultures to visit Portugal during this festive season, in order to experience Christmas traditions.

We analyze how institutional persistence unfolds. Building on an historical analysis of 3,307 bottle labels in the Bordeaux wine community, France, between 1924 and 2005, we find that the persistence of a chateau tradition requires considerable effort at maintenance. Instead of greater compression and taken-for-grantedness, we propose that expansion along multimodal carriers provides a marker of a deepening institutionalization. We underscore the role of community organizations in enabling a wine tradition to persist. The implications of our findings for institutional theory and multimodality research are discussed.

Management research has begun to explore how cultural entrepreneurs use established or declining societal traditions to create distinctive new ventures and products. In this study, we propose an alternative pathway for creating entrepreneurial opportunities, that is, through leveraging extinct societal traditions. Extinct societal traditions yield opportunities to create highly distinctive products and ventures, yet their use entails substantial challenges. To understand how entrepreneurs can successfully leverage extinct societal traditions, we investigate the case of The Merchant of Venice, an Italian venture established in 2013 that produces luxury perfumes based on the perfume-making tradition that flourished in Venice between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and disappeared afterwards. Our study illuminates how cultural entrepreneurs can leverage extinct societal traditions by (a) exhuming lost knowledge and practices, (b) validating them as an authentic and appreciable tradition of a given community and territory, and (c) elevating their meaningfulness as core to place identity. Our study contributes to the literature on cultural entrepreneurship and traditions by revealing the distinct challenges that resurrecting extinct traditions entail, enriching the understanding of types, goals, and processes of cultural entrepreneurship, and widening current knowledge of the roles of tradition custodians.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the value of Ghanaian weaving art tradition to humanity from socio-cultural and economic points of view. This study sought to answer questions such as “What is the interest of researchers regarding Ghanaian textile weaving art tradition?”, “To what extent has weaving art tradition projected the Ghanaian culture?” and “What is the socio-economic value of Ghanaian weaving art tradition?”

The systematic literature review approach was used to analyse data obtained from the Scopus online database. The PRISMA framework was adopted to select 22 relevant studies for analysis and conclusions. Also, the VOSviewer software was used to analyse and understand the co-occurrence of keywords.

It was revealed that Ghanaian weaving art tradition stands as a major craft that projects Ghana globally. Researchers around the world keep adding knowledge on Ghanaian traditional weaving and its value to humanity, resulting in a significant rise recently in the publication trend. Also, the rich cloth from the art is celebrated annually to invite people around the globe to learn the Ghanaian culture for social development. This study again found that traditional weaving serves as a major source of income for weavers and marketers of indigenous Ghanaian woven fabrics.

The findings of this study serve as a wake-up call to the Government of Ghana, institutional actors and national leaders to practically engage in the projection of the local art by playing individual roles such as financially supporting the craftsmen, initiating and implementing appropriate policies and displaying the local cloth on international occasions. This will make the local art more attractive for effective marketing and cultural preservation.

With reliable information extracted from the Scopus online database, this study presents original results and makes appropriate suggestions worth adopting for the improvement of the Ghanaian weaving art tradition.

This paper aims to explore the impact of differences in educational traditions on conventions of teaching and learning, and on the measurement of learning outcomes. These are critical issues within the context of business schools that are steeped in one dominant tradition but have a large population of international students previously educated in other traditions. The paper argues that international students face the challenge of satisfactorily demonstrating learning according to foreign conventions that are different from what they would have been accustomed to within the framework of their home educational tradition.

This study draws on a bilingual literature review to capture differences in educational traditions between Australia and China. It then uses logistic regression to analyze the performance of 800 domestic and international Chinese students across a range of different assessment formats at a large Australian business school.

The study finds statistically significant differences in the performance of these two student groups on different assessment types. It concludes that the conventions on approaches to the assessment of learning shaped by a specific educational tradition can hamper the effective demonstration of learning among students from other educational traditions.

The paper focuses on issues related to the assessment of learning in multicultural higher education contexts, which has received less attention in the literature compared to issues on teaching approaches in multicultural contexts. The paper also highlights important implications on the validity of the measurement of learning outcomes and on the subsequent impact on graduate recruitment.

The industrial relations tradition values empirical analysis and research usable for policy making. Considerations about epistemology and ontology and their consequences for the research are not integrated in the tradition. Just as daily research only very seldom relates to higher‐level theorising, a case in point being the development of a common theoretical framework, theoretical discussions are mostly separated from daily research into special rooms where discussion and development takes places among a few specialists. The industrial relations tradition also keeps women and research in gender in the periphery. This has consequences not only for the visibility of women’s labour market participation and for the status of the research in gender, but also for the industrial relations tradition, as it will become less able to see new tendencies and developments at the labour market and in industrial relations. The first part of the article discusses how the tradition – in spite of a growing acceptance of gender research – is still influenced by a male norm. In the second part the article endeavours to relate the under‐theorising of the IR tradition and the marginalisation of a gender perspective. The last part of the article introduces an integrated gender perspective as one – although incomplete – way to overcome these problems.

Large numbers of Africans still living in rural areas are considerably influenced by oral tradition. A lot of information can therefore be obtained through this form of communication. However, this kind of material has been largely neglected by librarians in Africa. Although a few centres exist in some countries where the oral tradition is collected, organised and disseminated, a number of obstacles prevent these centres from achieving their aims. The activities of some of these centres are discussed and some of the associated problems highlighted, with proposals made for their solution. The paper concludes that librarians in Africa must place a greater emphasis on oral tradition as a supplement to documentary sources. Oral tradition is an integral part of the African's heritage and it would be criminal to let it disappear.