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This paper aims to contribute to the core research in international business (IB), namely, the relationship between multinationality and performance and is concerned with the quality of past empirical research designs.

On the basis of 49 studies, given in a literature review, the match between performance measures used in empirical studies and the underlying theoretical streams that explain the effects on benefits and costs of multinationality is critically evaluated.

Findings indicate that authors still largely rely on overall financial performance measures. Theoretical arguments, in contrast, refer to specific benefit and cost positions that might be better reflected in operational performance indicators. The idiosyncratic choice of the performance measures used might contribute to the varying results in past studies.

Suggestions for improving future research designs are offered.

Nursing, as a gendered occupation, is one that requires vast amounts of emotional labor to be performed. As careworkers, nurses are required to assume multiple roles at work: medical expert, companion, and personal care provider. Roles, or expected behaviors associated with different statuses, have the potential to spillover between work and home environments. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate how nurses perceive their role-taking and emotional labor processes to influence experiences of work–family spillover.

Rooted in interactionist role theory, this investigation seeks to qualitatively examine how nurses assign meaning to their various roles and how they perceive their roles to influence work–family spillover. Using audio diary and interview data, this chapter proposes that nurses who practice role-person merger (Turner, 1978) and empathic role-taking (Shott 1979) will also perceive work–family spillover to be related to their caretaking roles as nurses. Three distinct themes emerged in this qualitative analysis related to how experiences of work–family spillover are influenced by the emotional labor demands of the job and the practice of empathic role-taking by nurses: (1) spillover related to required emotional labor is experienced both positively and negatively; (2) nurses actively exercise personal agency in an attempt to decrease negative spillover; and (3) nurses reported increased work–family spillover when they practiced empathic role-taking.

This analysis extends the literature in this area by demonstrating the connection between the structural influences on emotion, the individual perceptions of roles, and the subsequent experiences of work–family spillover.

Children are bombarded by branded communication every day. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role that particular linguistic devices play in communication, and whether this process differs between children and adults. One such device is phonetic symbolism, which has been shown to lead adults to prefer brand names whose phonetic attributes match product and/or brand features.

Three experiments were undertaken to examine children's (six to 12 years of age) preference for phonetically manipulated brand names. Experiment 1 replicates findings in previous research showing that preference for a particular brand name within a single product category is dependent on how the brand is described. Experiment 2 extends this research across product categories that are expected to lead to differential brand name preference (based on product features). Finally, experiment 3 investigates the interaction between pure phonetic symbolism and semantic information.

Children show similar patterns of brand name preference (with some age differences that could be attributable to developmental stages), and that they link particular sounds with specific brand/product attributes.

This research shows that when selecting an inventive and distinct brand name, consideration could be given to the relationship between vowel sounds and brand characteristics. The authors believe that the findings are of importance to marketers as they consider different approaches to the naming of new brands.

This is the first set of experiments to investigate the effects of phonetic symbolism on brand name preference utilising a children's sample.

The purpose of this paper is to understand blog users’ negative emotional norm compliance decision-making in crises (blog users’-NNDC).

A belief–desire–intention (BDI) model to evaluate the blog users’-NNDC (the BDI-NNDC model) was developed. This model was based on three social characteristics: self-interests, expectations and emotions. An experimental study was conducted to evaluate the efficiency of the BDI-NNDC model by using data retrieved from a popular Chinese social network called “Sina Weibo” about three major crises.

The BDI-NNDC model strongly predicted the Blog users’-NNDC. The predictions were as follows: a self-interested blog user posted content that was targeting his own interests; a blogger with high expectations wrote and commented emotionally negative blogs on the condition that the numbers of negative posts increased, while he ignored the norm when there was relatively less negative emotional news; and an emotional blog user obeyed the norm based on the emotional intentions of the blogosphere in most of the cases.

The BDI-NNDC model can explain the diffusion of negative emotions by blog users during crises, and this paper shows a way to bridge the social norm modelling and the research of blog users’ activity and behaviour characteristics in the context of “real life” crises. However, the criterion for differentiating blog users according to social characteristics needs to be further revised, as the generalizability of the results is limited by the number of cases selected in this study.

The current method could be applied to predict emotional trends of blog users who have different social characteristics and it could support government agencies to build strategic responses to crises.

This paper supports the creation of normative models and engineering methods to predict blog users’-NNDC and mitigate their effect in real-world crises.

Much scholarship has looked at how radical politics and its symbolism are framed and distorted by the mass media, while less attention has been devoted to how the symbolic imagery of violence and death is used in activists’ self-representations. This chapter provides one such alternative angle by probing how “visual protest materials” are creatively used in activists’ own videos to pass on stories of communion and contestation.It interrogates how activist video practices mirror the continuum between physical places and mediated spaces in political activism by analyzing a thread of videos circulating on YouTube that commemorate people who have died in connection with three protest events across Europe, putting on display the “spectacles of death” punctuating each of these events. The analysis draws on social semiotics, in particular the work of Barthes (1981) and Zelizer (2010), to examine how death is used as a visual trope to signify the ultimate prize of taking to the streets. This chapter suggests how agency and meaning travel back and forth between offline and online spaces of activism. Engaging with some implications of this interplay, the chapter argues that, in the quest to document truth and induce realism and immediacy, tensions between fact and fiction emerge in the creative appropriation and remixing of images. Finally, it demonstrates how the cityscape is recruited to document and dramatize the spectacle of death as part of a larger struggle for semiotic resources within the protest space and over media representations of social movements more generally.