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The authors discuss the case of Whang-od, a renowned and revered tattooist in the Philippines, whose skill with batok (traditional tattoos) has generated worldwide attention. While batok was originally designed for a warrior class to signify their power and elite status, it has been transformed into a commodity for national and global audiences and promoted via social media. Utilizing participation observation of, and interviews with, visitors to the village where Whang-od lives, the authors show how this form of “ethnic tourism” is built around the status of batok as an authentic practice that influences both the ways that locals present, and tourists, try to consume, the culture of the village.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether operating countries influence restaurant franchising system performance and what would be an optimal international franchise proportion.

The authors observed ten publicly traded franchise firms that operated between 1995 and 2015. Data analysis is conducted through a generalized linear model (GLM) of panel data.

The model confirms a curvilinear U-shaped relationship between international franchise expansion and firm performance, similar to domestic franchising. The authors found that international franchisors have a higher optimal franchise proportion than domestic franchisors. The authors did not find that operating countries influence firm performance.

This study contributes to franchising literature by expanding limited empirical studies on international franchising. It provides practitioners with a new optimal franchise proportion at the international level.

This chapter identifies and analyzes three systemic obstacles to American public policy addressing natural disasters: symbolic obstacles, cognitive obstacles, and structural obstacles. The way we talk about natural disaster, the way we think about the risks of building in hazardous places, and structural aspects of American political institutions all favor development over restraint. These forces have such strength that in the wake of most disasters society automatically and thoughtlessly responds by rebuilding what was damaged or destroyed, even if reconstruction perpetuates disaster vulnerability. Only by addressing each of the obstacles identified are reform efforts likely to succeed.

This paper aims to investigate investors' willingness to use robo-advisors from customers' perspectives and analyzes the factors that drive them to use robo-advisors, including perceived usefulness and emotional response.

The authors extend the Cognition-Affect-Conation (CAC) framework to the behavioral domain of robo-advisor users on financial technology platforms and conduct an empirical study based on 248 valid questionnaires.

The authors find two types of factors driving the willingness to use robo-advisors: perceived usefulness, trust and perceived risk as external driving forces and investor sentiment as an internal driving force. Trust has a significant positive effect on willingness to use, and arousal in emotional response plays a mediating role between perceived usefulness and willingness to use.

This research provides valuable insights for financial institutions to engage in robo-advisor innovation from customers' perspectives.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its related economic meltdown and social unrest severely challenged most countries, their societies, economies, organizations, and individual citizens. Focusing on both more and less successful country-specific initiatives to fight the pandemic and its multitude of related consequences, this chapter explores implications for leadership and effective action at the individual, organizational, and societal levels. As international management scholars and consultants, the authors document actions taken and their wide-ranging consequences in a diverse set of countries, including countries that have been more or less successful in fighting the pandemic, are geographically larger and smaller, are located in each region of the world, are economically advanced and economically developing, and that chose unique strategies versus strategies more similar to those of their neighbors. Cultural influences on leadership, strategy, and outcomes are described for 19 countries. Informed by a cross-cultural lens, the authors explore such urgent questions as: What is most important for leaders, scholars, and organizations to learn from critical, life-threatening, society-encompassing crises and grand challenges? How do leaders build and maintain trust? What types of communication are most effective at various stages of a crisis? How can we accelerate learning processes globally? How does cultural resilience emerge within rapidly changing environments of fear, shifting cultural norms, and profound challenges to core identity and meaning? This chapter invites readers and authors alike to learn from each other and to begin to discover novel and more successful approaches to tackling grand challenges. It is not definitive; we are all still learning.

This paper aims to investigate the corporate-level determinants (i.e. management commitment) of work ability. It also examined whether mid-level contextual variables intensify the relationship between management commitment and the work ability of senior casino dealers.

A three-level hierarchical analysis of data from 432 casino dealers from 16 casinos was performed to determine the proportion of variance in the dependent variable when the explanatory variables were at varying hierarchical levels.

The findings suggest that management commitment has a positive and significant impact on frontline dealers’ work ability. Furthermore, supervisor support and group trust have moderating effects on the relationship between management commitment and dealers’ work ability.

The current study provides important information on how to increase the ability of aging dealer to remain active and learn new skills.

Work ability has received substantial attention from recent studies of human resources because of its close relationship to employee job skills and competencies. However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no conceptual model explains the role of work ability role in promoting and updating human resources management practices and policies.