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This is a conceptual paper that tries to highlight, articulate and think about the relationship of public relations (PR) with culture, and examines how Saudi Arabian traditional cultural practices, such as wasta and karam, influence how PR functions in this area. While PR in the Middle East is currently still developing, its present state is affected by confusion as to what PR means and what it should do in a company. Researchers have examined what determines the state of PR in this area by examining the economic development of the countries and the relationship between PR practitioners and journalists. Existing research has, however, chosen to look at Arab PR through a Western lens, which means they have examined the state of PR in this area by Western standards of PR and have not taken into consideration Arab culture. The paper will examine how the elements and cultural differences complicate the understanding of PR practice in Saudi Arabia and therefore what questions need to be asked to be able to clarify these things at a theoretical level, but also to be able to look at the practice in analytical terms.

Student counselling in schools is an area that is well established in both developing and developed countries around the world, and has been made available to a wide range of ages (i.e. 5–18 years old) (Harris, 2013). In addition, while the many benefits of student counselling have been widely researched and documented, the problems and obstacles encountered by student counsellors has received less attention. This research aims to combine a brief review of the literature, with the researcher's own 16 years of professional experience of student counselling in Saudi schools, in order to provide a critical account of Saudi student counselling practices. The research shows that cultural, social and financial barriers and challenges may be stopping student counselling practices from developing effectively in Saudi Arabia. It puts forward ways in which student counselling practices might be improved in order to help children and young people in schools across Saudi Arabia.

To survive competition, it is vital for firms to be innovative. As a firm’s cultural predisposition, organisational innovativeness provides an environment that fosters innovations and thus actively supports new product or service development. The purpose of this study is to measure organisational innovativeness and its multiple dimensions from a cultural-strategic perspective on a multifaceted formative scale which we develop theoretically and by means of qualitative interviews. Furthermore, we empirically validate the newly developed construct by investigating how innovativeness and its dimensions translate into innovation success by examining the relationship between innovativeness and innovation performance in depth. Our findings suggest that a strategic focus on innovations, an extrinsic motivation system, openness in communication, as well as management encouragement are all dimensions of organisational innovativeness. Further, our results support the need for a proficient innovation process as a mechanism to systematically and continuously translate innovativeness into successful innovations. Innovation process proficiency fully mediates the relationship between innovativeness and innovation performance, while the contingency factor competitive intensity enhances this performance impact.

The chapter portrays the GCC region starting with its history. It overviews the evolution of the region and particularly the establishment of the GCC. Furthermore, it depicts the overall economic profile of the region and its socioeconomic development since its inception. It ends with the content description of the whole book.

This chapter aims to illustrate the different environmental factors and their impact on entrepreneurship in Qatar. Despite its economic prosperity and governmental efforts to foster entrepreneurship Qatar still has not achieved its full potential in this regard. The analysis of the situation of entrepreneurship in Qatar shows no insurmountable difficulties at the macro-level. The problems are rather due to culture generated personality traits that are common among Qatari people. In fact, the fear of failure and the aversion towards risk and stress are negatively impacting entrepreneurial intentions among the population. The example of Qatar shows that a favourable economic situation does not necessarily promote entrepreneurship. The Qatari government is making huge efforts to optimise the legal and economic situation in order to reduce business risk and facilitate start-ups. However, it still has to invest more in human development in order to make Qatari people aware of the opportunities that their country is offering for innovative business ideas.

This article jointly analyses a behavioural and a cultural concept to explain household debt portfolio choice. The behavioural approach explores the role of time preferences on household debt maturity in a theoretical model and a numerical analysis. We derive a positive relationship between the long-term discount factor δ and the optimal maturity of household loans. The cultural approach examines whether national culture is a reasonable predictor for household debt maturity. We show that culture is an important factor for households’ borrowing decisions and has even more predictive power than time preferences. Countries with higher scores on the Hofstede dimension of long-term orientation tend to have shorter household debt maturity. Time preferences incur a primarily mediating role, because the effect of national culture on the borrowing decision is reduced, as the long-term discount factor δ increases.

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the concept and state of the art of stakeholder management. The objectives include the coverage of the key aspects of stakeholder management from the perspective of the literature, the synthesis of some problems of implementing stakeholder management in developing countries and formulation of solutions to these problems, and guidance on implementation of stakeholder management in developing countries. Twelve semi-structured virtual interviews with practitioners in some developing countries informed most of the contents of the chapter: the problems and solutions concerning stakeholder management in developing countries where the traditional type of procurement is still commonly used for project delivery. The content analysis of the interview data showed that, apart from the internal stakeholders of clients, design consultants, contractors and their teams of professionals, and other workers, another set of project stakeholders would include community organizations, trade unions, non-government organizations and sundry individuals, or groups. These many stakeholders present high chances of conflicting stakes. Power influences the prioritization of stakes in developing countries, i.e., the interests of more powerful stake-holders are accorded higher priority. Government and public establishments are often considered to be powerful; hence, there is often a general reluctance to challenge their stakes and those of the stakeholders associated with them. Moreover, some traditions and cultures are strong in communities, regions, or nations, and stakeholder engagements follow these norms. Some details of traditional protocols that are observed while negotiating conflicting stakes are often not documented, and the knowledge needed is sometimes deployed tacitly. Meanwhile, some socio-cultural protocols and government bureaucracy may slow down project procedures, but claiming for time extensions and other reliefs by project participants is virtually never done on these grounds. Another major influence in some developing countries is land ownership, which tends to be a leveraging factor on which some external stakeholders either bargain for compensation and concessions or attempt to disrupt a project. As “knowledge is power,” there is scope for increasing the awareness and thus power of especially external stakeholders in developing countries.

In the process of studying contemporary animation art in mainland China, we used historical, economic and cultural backgrounds as a reference to discuss the evolution of Chinese contemporary animation films, trying to infer the regularity and inevitability of it. Especially in the 21st century, accompanying the economic, science and technology development rapidly, a cultural diversity has made Chinese animation films open and inclusive. The outstanding works have cut a stringing figure. The traditional rational color, a humanistic concept and an enlightenment mode in the film are gradually becoming a type of consumerism model with a contemporary style. Affected by the wave of the consumerism, the style of film convergence is obvious. From the perspective of consumer culture, the theme, creative mode and visual style of works have undergone a series of changes with shallow thinking and monotonous cultural reflection. By studying the characteristics of animation film, we also puts forward the hope and expectation of animation creation.

One of the countries where tradition and modernity meet is Qatar. From a very poor country in the 20^th century to ultra-modern in the 21^st century, Qatar became a place in which visitors, workers and business people can find what they look for. The richness of the country’s diversified business outlook and culture appeals various stakeholders to stay, visit and do business in this country. In this line, the chapter portrays fundamental information on Qatar, its traditional doing of business through bazaars, the current context of business pursued in this country and the future regarding the country’s business stand up.

In October 2016, a photo went viral in which Chinese executives of the Korean corporation Samsung were kowtowing at a sales meeting in Heibei Province. The picture created a scandal; online bloggers claimed South Korean executives “forced” their Chinese counterparts to kowtow to apologize for product failure with one of their products, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7. Kowtowing has different meanings in China and in Korea and debate on the meaning of bowing arose. The case discusses the scandal and encourages students to reflect on cultural differences and their effects on business practices.

As times pass by, new technologies have been invented, and new approaches have been applied to the spread of information in this age of globalization—and they are obvious specifically in music. While the transformation of how musicians produce music and make themselves heard differ from the early days, the process of the transformation is often overlooked and viewed as inevitable. In fact, the users of these new, modern tools need time for adaption. The most noticeable change in musical production is how it shifts from analog to digital. This includes change of ways to create, quickly, and almost simultaneously the musical works in terms of content, length, how they are marketed and presented, and so on. Thus, the change actually goes deep—technology has changed the ways artists create, and the artists who adapt to these new approaches have changed music. In this paper, I will choose hip hop as the musical genre to elaborate on how it grows and develops in Taiwan in relation to the external factors.

This chapter explores the concepts of ethics, morals and social responsibility from organisational and societal perspectives covering both marketing that is focused on profit and marketing focused on bringing about social benefit. It discusses the meanings of social responsibility from different paradigmatic viewpoints and highlights the advantages and limitations of particular approaches. The chapter also considers some aspects of legal and regulatory frameworks and the potential for the development of codes of conduct for socially responsible for-profit marketing and social marketing. The discussion is positioned in a global context and is grounded by intercultural considerations and the diversity of ethical perspectives and norms across cultures.

People of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) backgrounds, representing around 28 per cent of Australians and hundreds of ethnic backgrounds and language groups, are often overlooked or under-considered in health communication campaigns. This diversity presents challenges for those wishing to successfully communicate health messages, particularly given the fragmenting communications landscape. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light many of these challenges and the, often, limited consideration given to CALD communities in communicating urgent health messages. This chapter reviews the Victorian government’s innovative CALD Youth Content Campaign which engaged social media influencers to communicate COVID-19 messages through channels not ordinarily accessible to government communication teams. From this case study, we draw insights for future health campaigns aimed at diverse audiences.

Stories are integral parts of our being and living and have immense power to harm or to heal. The time is right to advance a new process that we call story-bridging, because of where society is now poised, and because of a prevailing culture of vehement separation and polarization, with attendant false-storying. Story-bridging taps into the power of story. It is a process of engaging sensitively and positively with others where there are opposing views (at all levels: individual, community, organization, institution, nation-state), where there have been negative impacts on society, the economy, the environment, and our essential connectedness. Story-bridging is a process of creating, refining and sharing stories in a way that ignites connections and fosters exciting possibilities.

By school years, mathematics in the classroom becomes separated from real life. However, if teachers can bring context back into mathematics, like the kids experience outside of school, math becomes real. Beginning class by teaching students a bit about what it’s like to live in another part of the world brings class alive. Global Math Stories (GlobalMathStories.org) is a resource that helps educators make cultural and global connections in the classroom. In this presentation, participants learned about the resource and explored the value of making global connections in the classroom.

We studied the effect of time windows of a few seconds on the aesthetic appreciation of poems. Both Chinese and German subjects rated traditional Chinese poetic verses more beautiful in a time window of approximately 3 s, irrespective of understanding the poetic content. This observation suggests a common temporal preference for poetry appreciation across a different language background.

Successful culture of the obligatorily anaerobic symbionts residing in the hindgut of the wood-eating cockroach Cryptocercus punctulatus now permits continuous observation of mitosis in individual Barbulanympha cells. In Part I of this two-part paper, we report methods for culture of the protozoa, preparation of microscope slide cultures in which Barbulanympha survived and divided for up to 3 days, and an optical arrangement which permits observation and through-focus photographic recording of dividing cells, sequentially in differential interference contrast and rectified polarized light microscopy. We describe the following prophase events and structures: development of the astral rays and large extranuclear central spindle from the tips of the elongate-centrioles; the fine structure of spindle fibers and astral rays which were deduced in vivo from polarized light microscopy and seen as a particular array of microtubules in thin-section electron micrographs; formation of chromosomal spindle fibers by dynamic engagement of astral rays to the kinetochores embedded in the persistent nuclear envelope; and repetitive shortening of chromosomal spindle fibers which appear to hoist the nucleus to the spindle surface, cyclically jostle the kinetochores within the nuclear envelope, and churn the prophase chromosomes. The observations described here and in Part II have implications both for the evolution of mitosis and for understanding the mitotic process generally.

Chondrocytes in the growth plate undergo a relatively linear differentiation process. The progression of a chondrocyte from the proliferative stage to the hypertrophic stage is governed by complex interactions with the extracellular matrix within which it resides. A network of peptides, ion channels, and second messengers affects the transcription of certain genes that are ultimately translated into peptides which control cellular activity. Much effort has been invested into replicating this environment under in vitro conditions. It has been found that the three-dimensional (3D) cell culture is a more accurate representation of the in vivo environment in comparison to the traditional monolayer culture. It has also been found that a variety of stimuli may be used to induce the proliferation and differentiation of chondrocytes; one such stimulus is the mechanical stimulation of chondrocytes embedded in a 3D Gelfoam sponge. Chondrocytes are obtained from the chicken sternum. After the cells are cultured and cyclically loaded, mRNA levels of various mechanosensitive genes are quantified by real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Mechanical stimulation has been shown to upregulate the expression of type X collagen mRNA in early hypertrophic chondrocytes. The entire process, beginning with the obtainment of chondrocytes and ending with the quantification and interpretation of gene expression, is detailed in the following chapter.

This chapter examines abstract concepts of innovators' competences and innovation culture. For people to be innovative, both concepts need to be considered. Ontologies provide a way to specify these abstract concepts into such a format that practical applications can be applied in organizations. Self-evaluation of innovation competence and innovation culture in organizations can be conducted by utilizing a fuzzy logic application platform called Evolute. The approach described in this chapter has management implications. The abstract concepts of innovation culture and innovation competence become manageable, which suggests that organizations should be able to get better innovation results.

Cultural variations across countries are considered a major factor affecting customers' readiness to adopt, use, and evaluate technology. Relevant contributions from marketing studies, computer science, and international business are integrated into the literature of cross-cultural management and technology acceptance, and a conceptual model is developed. Drawing on a broader research project on radio frequency identification (RFID) aimed at supporting intelligent business networking and innovative customer services, the development of the framework is informed by the authors' work in the preparation of an RFID-based application at several established grocery retailers for short-life products in Ireland and in Greece. From the findings of our exploratory study, it emerges that low uncertainty avoidance, low institutional collectivism, high in-group collectivism, high gender egalitarianism, and low humane orientation are conducive to greater customers' acceptance of new service technologies. Managerial implications and directions for future research are discussed.