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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.

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.

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.

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.

Using modified versions of the Domain-Specific Risk-Taking (DOSPERT) scale, we conducted surveys among German and Chinese university students. Our tests confirm previous findings that risk taking is indeed domain-specific. More importantly, our results show that differences in risk behavior are attributable more to perceived risk than to expected benefits. Risk behavior is almost entirely predictable by differences in the attitude towards perceived risk, but less so by differences in the subjective evaluation of expected benefits. Additionally, our study measures risk attitude through two distinct methodologies: on an individual-subject level and on a group-level. We find that the individual-subject risk attitude can lead to inadequate conclusions. Furthermore, our research highlights the relevance of national culture as an important factor for explaining risk-taking propensity. Our findings yield substantial support for the ‘cushion hypothesis’ and highlight the usefulness of the cultural dimension of individualism versus collectivism in order to explain risk behavior.

Effects of porous hydroxyapatite granules (HAGs) on osteogenesis were examined in vitro using cells from adult rabbit femurs. Cultures in the space of 30-600 μm between glass plates with two-dimensionally arranged HAGs on the horizontal bottom glass surface induced thin insular tissue formation within 2 weeks. It was induced earlier and more than that without HAGs. Von Kossa staining-positive tissues were found at 1-2 weeks after their formation, suggesting their mineralization. No cells or several cells in monolayer were included within some of them. Several grew quadrate tissues. Similar thin tissues were formed in inclined and rotated glass tubes with three-dimensionally arranged HAGs. They were almost irregular in shape. By contrast, little extracellular matrix deposition and no mineralization were seen in the spaces over 600 μm and under 30 μm between the glasses with HAGs. These results suggest that osteoblastic cells from adult femurs form mineralized quadrate tissues with or without embedded cells on the horizontal glass in the space of 30-600 μm, while mechanical loading without system induces irregular-shaped tissue formation. Porous HAGs in the space seem to accelerate extracellular matrix accumulation and its mineralization.

Arcobacters are considered emerging foodborne pathogens frequently isolated from animal food products and various types of water. However, there is no data on the presence of Arcobacter spp. in fresh vegetables and given that the consumption of salads has increased, it could be interesting to monitoring its microbiological contamination. Therefore the objective of this research was to study the presence of Arcobacter spp. in fresh lettuces. Fifty fresh lettuces purchased from different local shops in Valencia (Spain) between January and July of 2009 were analyzed. The assay was performed simultaneously by PCR and cultural methods. Arcobacter sp. was detected in 10 of the 50 samples by PCR, but just in one of them the detection was possible without enrichment. A. butzleri was the only detected species by multiplex PCR. Seven samples were found to be positive also by culture. Nineteen isolates were obtained, being all of them identified as A. butzleri. To our knowledge, this is the first report of Arcobacter spp. detection in fresh vegetables such as lettuces. Although these foods are generally considered safe, given the large quantities consumed and the fact that further cooking is absent, they could be a potential public health risk.

Rural landscape is the resource base to develop rural tourism. Under the background of tourism development, the “rurality” of rural landscape is threatened by the reverse change of rural landscape patterns, which goes against the sustainable development of rural tourism. From the perspective of landscape ecology, the paper makes a deep analysis of negative influence of the development of rural tourism nowadays on rural landscape ecology and explores how to actively and effectively protect rural landscape so as to promote the sustainable and healthy development of rural landscape tourism. Moreover, methods and measures aiming to facilitate the rational development of rural landscape are put forward.