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Multilevel approaches are generally well suited to group communication because what people say and do in groups is a function of intra- and trans-individual mechanisms. This chapter first provides a brief overview of group research as a multilevel problem and then describes more modern approaches to modeling nested data using latent variable models, including multilevel structural equation modeling and latent class analysis. The chapter concludes by addressing conceptual opportunities provided by multilevel latent modeling approaches to group communication.

Group communication as an area of intellectual interest had its beginnings in communication pedagogy with the goal of helping students to become more effective decision makers. A by-product is that group decision making became and remained a central research focus for many years. In the last 20 years, group communication research has facilitated the development of theory, research methods, and technology. Since 2000, group communication scholars have developed research lines on (1) virtual/digital team communication; (2) information sharing, hidden profile, and transactive memory systems; and (3) group participation. This chapter also explores the way in which group communication scholars have become connected with other disciplines that study groups and teams. The chapter concludes with current research methods trends, including interaction analysis, multilevel modeling, and qualitative methods.

Across different research fields, it is increasingly acknowledged that gender is not a binary variable and goes beyond the male–female dichotomy. At the same time, gender is a prominent social cue that affects evaluations and interactions among individuals. Thus, gender can impact social processes on many levels in complex ways. Meetings provide arenas where key social processes unfold that are relevant to the organization. Understanding which role gender takes in this context is therefore central to organizations as well as meeting research. This chapter provides a critical review of research to date on social influence in meetings, specifically zooming in on the role of gender. The authors conducted a multi-step systematic literature review and identified 43 studies across a wide area of disciplines (e.g., psychology, communication, and management). The authors put special emphasis on the methodologies employed across this work since a comprehensive understanding of the applied methods is core for a synthesis of research results. Through the analysis, the authors pinpoint six variables – individual gender, sex role orientation, gender composition, gender salience, contextual factors such as task type and organizational settings, and the construction of gender as a social concept – that are directly related to gender and which represent factors that are critical for the role of gender in the meeting context. Thereby, this chapter aims to provide a roadmap for researchers and practitioners interested in the role of gender during workplace meetings. The authors conclude by highlighting methodological and managerial recommendations and suggest avenues for future research.

This commentary describes (1) the role of group communication research in Communication Departments and (2) reflects my personal experiences in conducting group and team research with international and interdisciplinary group scholars. I describe the challenges associated with research funding, research space, participant pools, and research technology. Additionally, I address international and interdisciplinary influences (i.e., team science, university/government/industry collaboration) on communication research. This chapter concludes by identifying interdisciplinary contexts for group and team communication research including children and teens' groups, healthcare teams, and robot–human teams.

The purpose of this study is to frame the dimensions of the external institutional environment, namely, cultural-cognitive, normative and regulative dimensions as the main actors in the organisational field. More precisely, Libyan commercial banks have been identified as empirical evidence, to identify constraints of the institutional environment governing the behaviour and decision-making of commercial banks, when adopting Islamic financial transactions.

A questionnaire has been designed for 14 Libyan commercial banks which is distributed to the Board of Directors, managers, directors of departments, and personnel. The exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and the measurement model by using the first-order and second-order confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) have been applied as essential steps to embody the conceptual framework and test the research hypotheses.

The results of the EFA indicated sufficient correlation among the dimensions of the external environment. The CFA supported this study’s hypotheses. The modelling showed that the cultural-cognitive, normative and regulative dimensions are institutional constraints impeding Libyan commercial banks’ adoption of Islamic financial transactions. Interestingly, the findings of the CFA align with the EFA findings in supporting the conceptual framework of the research. They portrayed that the cultural-cognitive dimension has been identified by explicit and implicit cognition.

This study systematically embodies the dimensions of the external institutional environment, namely, cultural-cognitive, normative and regulative dimensions, as the main factors in the organisational field to be conceptually rich lenses to investigate social considerations to reinforce institutional thought broadly. The results of this study were consistent with extant Islamic financial literature, reflecting symmetry and similarity across commercial banks, particularly at the first stage of adopting Islamic financial transactions.

Brazil is a key tourism receiving country. Based on improvements with regard to infrastructure, supra‐structure (hotels, etc.), professional education and new equipment, international arrivals have reached more than 5 million in 2001. However, Brazil faces a number of old new problems, not only tied to tourism but also with regard to the general business environment. This article describes the very complet phaenomen “tourism in Brazil” on the basis of many examples.

The aim of the paper is to shed light on the use of chitosans and chitooligosaccharides as biopreservatives in various foods animal. Foods of animal and aquatic origin (milk, meat, fish, eggs, sea foods, etc) become contaminated with a wide range of microorganisms (bacteria, molds and yeasts) during harvesting, transporting, processing, handling and storage operations. Due to the perishable nature of these foods, their preservation is of utmost importance. Though many synthetic chemicals are available, yet their use is quite restricted due to their hazardous effects on human health.

Within the domain of food industry, traditionally chitosan is used for biopreservation of foods, which is well known for its nutritional and medicinal properties in human nutrition. However, chitooligosaccharides also possess a number of nutraceutical and health promoting properties in addition to their preservative effect and shelf-life extension of foods. In this study, the comparative effects of both chitosan and chitooligosaccharides on preservation of foods of animal and aquatic origin have been summarized.

Though chitosan has been extensively studied in various foods, yet the use of chitooligosaccharides has been relatively less explored. Chitooligosaccharides are bioactive molecules generated from chitosan and have several advantages over the traditional use of chitosan both in food products and on human health. But unfortunately, little or no literature is available on the use of chitooligosaccharides for preservation of some of the foods of animal origin. Notable examples in this category include cheese, beef, pork, chicken, fish, sea foods, etc.

This paper focuses on the effects of chitosans and chitooligosaccharides on the processing and storage quality of foods of animal and aquatic origin, which offers a promising future for the development of functional foods.

Lens of conservation of resources (COR) theory has been used to study how organizations can create resource passageways for their employees via managers. This has been examined in cross-cultural virtual work teams distributed across time and space within the high-resource loss context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Longitudinal field design was used in a transnational organization involving data collection at three times over eight months. At Time 1, qualitative methodology was used to propose a conceptual model. At Time 2 and Time 3, an online survey was used to collect data for 205 virtual work teams across 10 countries in the Asia–Pacific region pre and post “manager as coach” training respectively.

Using COR theory, the study highlights that “manager as coach” training is an effective resource for managers in the high resource depletion context of the pandemic. Access to timely support increases saliency for the resource-gain spiral and has a cross-over impact on virtual work team outcomes suggesting transferability of resources from managers to subordinates. Also, managers across all nationalities view coaching training as an equally valuable resource.

The study provides evidence for investment in timely and relevant support for managers to positively and swiftly impact virtual work teams during high-resource loss contexts.

The study expands COR crossover theory across space and time dimensions using a longitudinal field research design.

The article offers a study of the central food marketplace in Santiago, Dominican Republic. The purpose of the study is to explore how changes in the marketplace reflect transformation of urban food systems resulting from neoliberal restructuring during the final decades of the twentieth century.

Drawing on long-term qualitative research conducted during the late 1990s and early 2000s, including ethnographic and survey methods, the article illustrates how central urban marketplaces offer a window into transitions in both international and domestic food economies.

Research findings illustrate that the marketplace in Santiago operated in a state of economic hybridity, intermixing long established regionally produced domestic crops such as yuca, plantains and pigeon peas deeply rooted in Dominican agrarian culture with products dervived from liberalization of the Dominican economy such as imported rice, beans and eventually numerous Dominican food staples.

The study is limited by the scope of analysis which is one urban marketplace. More sites for researching marketplaces could be added for more comparative analysis.

The research findings have implications for how governments define social and economic policy that impacts domestic food producers and intermediary brokers that aggregate and debulk food to feed cities.

The scholarship raises questions about how the social and economic organization of urban marketplaces in the Dominican Republic and elsewhere reflect historical transitions in local, national and global economies.