Search results for "cultural distance"
showing 10 items of 11 documents
Overcoming Cultural Distance in Social OER Environments
2014
Open educational resources (OERs) provide opportunities as enablers of societal development, but they also create new challenges. From the perspective of content providers and educational institutions, particularly, cultural and context-related challenges emerge. Even though barriers regarding large-scale adoption of OERs are widely discussed, empirical evidence for determining challenges in relation to particular contexts is still rare. Such context-specific barriers generally can jeopardize the acceptance of OERs and, in particular, social OER environments. We conducted a large-scale (N = 855) cross-European investigation in the school context to determine how teachers and learners percei…
Intercultural customer service encounters : a behavioral study of satisfactory and unsatisfactory service outcomes
2012
Ulkomaalaistaustaisten asukkaiden ja turistien määrä Suomessa on kasvanut huomattavasti viime vuosien aikana. Yritysten resurssien ohjaaminen tämän alati kasvavan ja ostovoimaisen asiakaskunnan tarpeiden huomioimiseen voisi edistää asiakaspalvelualan yritysten liiketoimintaa. Tällä hetkellä on kuitenkin epäselvää miten hyvin ulkomaalaisten asiakkaiden erityistarpeet on huomioitu suomalaisessa asiakaspalvelussa. Tutkimuksen tavoitteena oli tutkia asiakastyytyväisyyttä kulttuurienvälisissä asiakaspalvelutilanteissa Suomessa. Kvalitatiivinen tutkimus suoritettiin puoli-strukturoitujen teemahaastatteluiden avulla ja haastateltaviksi valittiin joukko ulkomaalaisia vaihto- ja tutkinto-opiskelijoi…
Culture, Cultural Distance and Cultural Intelligence : A Multilevel Hierarchical Linear Model Analysis of Contextual Business Cultural Intelligence Q…
2019
Master's thesis Business Administration BE501 - University of Agder 2019 Purpose –The purpose of our master thesis is to investigate contextual antecedents to Cultural Intelligence development. Particularly, we assess the ability of cultural distance to predict Business Cultural Intelligence Quotient scores.Design / methodology / approach–Given our literature review, we hypothesize that cultural distance significantly affects BCIQ in a positive way. For this matter, we split our hypothesis into three sub-hypothesis and measured cultural distance in three ways: having at least one foreign parent, the Mahalanobis cultural distance, and the delta of each GLOBE’s practices dimensions expressed …
Market Entry and Priority of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in the Software Industry: An Empirical Analysis of Cultural Distance, Geographic Dist…
2007
This article investigates the influence of cultural distance, geographic distance, and three market size variables in the target country preference of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the software industry. In addition, the authors examine the shift of SMEs’ priorities in country selection by analyzing how these factors affect the selection of the first, second, and third target countries. The empirical findings suggest that approximately 70% of country choices can be explained by software market size and geographic distance alone. The findings also show that SMEs’ entry priorities shift quickly from countries within a short geographic distance to countries with high purchasing …
The Internationalization of B2B Digital Platform Providers : The Role of Cross-National Distance and Digital Characteristics
2020
Digitalization offers new opportunities and changes how firms can explore and enter new markets. Current literature has deepened our understanding of the internationalization process of digital-based firms, but it provides very little guidance on how the specific characteristics of digital artifacts enable and accelerate internationalization or of the role of crossnational distance and cultural difference. We use a longitudinal single-case approach to explore how a Business-to-Business (B2B) platform provider internationalized its operations from inception. The case study illustrates that the ongoing development of the digital service and the integration with new devices played an important…
The audio describer as a cultural mediator
2017
AbstractAudio Description (AD) is a modality of audiovisual translation that consists of making cultural products accessible to people who are blind or partially-sighted. Our study focuses on the contrastive analysis of the AD of four films in English and Spanish, our objective being to determine how the same visual cultural reference is described in two languages and for two target cultures. Using a descriptive methodology, we categorise and analyse cultural references followingDíaz Cintas and Remael’s (2007)classification and determine the translation strategies used. Our research shows that the decisions that the describer makes are conditioned by the distance, not only geographical but …
Adaptability and Ongoing Contractual Term Specificity: Advancements and Theoretical Implications
2013
Studies on interfirm contractual relations have followed an incremental path. Recent developments have suggested a dichotomous property of contracts (i.e., contingent adaptability and ongoing contractual term specificity). Such a view is one step toward resolving most contradictory findings in studies related to contracting that have assumed a single dimension. This article takes a step toward minimizing the vacuum on contracting theory by adding a stronger theoretical base that takes into account the dichotomous property of contracts. Findings suggest some differences and similarities in these key contractual components.
Geographic, cultural, and psychic distance to foreign markets in the context of small and new ventures
2015
Abstract More often than one might expect, small and new ventures, which already suffer from few resources and a lack of industry legitimacy, take on the additional uncertainties of entry into foreign markets. Some of these foreign entries involve countries that are geographically distant and culturally different from the firm's home country, making foreign market entry all the more difficult and uncertain. Recent studies have criticized prior academic approaches to understanding these difficulties. Insights may be limited if one uses merely the concept of distance and looks primarily for main effects. Entry by new and small ventures into distant foreign markets is complex, and the factors …
Removing the barriers to adoption of social OER environments
2015
Despite the opportunities and benefits of OER, research and practice has shown how the OER repositories have a hard time in reaching an active user-base. The opportunities of experience exchange and simple feedback mechanisms of social software have been realized for improving the situation and many are basing or transforming their OER offerings towards socially powered environments. Research on social software has shown how knowledge-sharing barriers in online environments are highly culture and context-specific and require proper investigation. It is crucial to study what challenges might arise in such environments and how to overcome them, ensuring a successful uptake. A large-scale (N =…
Cultural Distance and International Trade in Services: A Disaggregate View
2020
Abstract In this paper, we estimate the effect of “cultural distance” on bilateral trade in services. The measure of cultural distance we use is based on scores that reflect country averages of individuals’ attitudes towards inequality, self-orientation, competition, uncertainty, traditions, and indulgence. Controlling for standard ingredients of gravity equations, we show that an aggregate measure of cultural distance has a significantly negative effect on total bilateral services trade. Once we take a more disaggregate view, we find that the strength of this effect differs across various types of services and various aspects of cultural distance.