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This paper aims to examine how future top managers in India develop their corporate social responsibility (CSR) orientation. Based on socialization theory, this paper investigates how individual determinants influence CSR orientation by focusing on the two main drivers of CSR in India – the philanthropic and strategic imperatives.

A survey of 204 students currently enrolled in a post-graduation program at an Indian Institute of Management was conducted via an online questionnaire. By applying a logistic regression analysis, determinants of CSR orientation are revealed.

The results of the study indicate the influence of different factors of primary and secondary socialization on an individual’s CSR orientation. The study finds that women and younger individuals have a tendency toward a strategic CSR orientation. Alternatively, religiousness and emotional stability predict a philanthropic CSR orientation. Furthermore, business school education leads to a strategic CSR orientation.

The study focuses on a number of determinants that were evaluated to be important. Future research should broaden the scope and include additional, and more sensitive, factors.

The study provides insights that organizations can incorporate in their recruiting processes to strengthen their CSRO development.

The study addresses the gap that exists in current literature on CSRO in India by not just describing but diving deeper and investigating the demographic and psychographic determinants of individuals’ CSRO. A step further is taken to identify individuals’ inclinations toward either a strategic or a philanthropic approach to CSR.

This study aims to investigate how the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Chinese outward foreign direct investments (FDI) impact the Belt and Road countries (BRCs). It draws on postcolonial theory to investigate the (geo)political objectives behind the financial and economic means.

In line with the nature of postcolonial studies, the study applies a discourse analysis integrating it with empirical data on indebtedness and trade.

This study finds that FDI and the BRI, as a development project, need to be considered a double-edged sword for the receiving countries. The authors provide evidence that China has instrumentalized financial and economic means to gain political influence and pursue geopolitical ambitions. Moreover, investments into sensitive sectors (e.g. energy, infrastructure), combined with the BRCs’ inability to pay back loans, could eventually lead to China gaining control of these assets.

The study investigates the financial and economic means that are instrumentalized to gain political influence while not considering flows of technology and know-how. It also limits itself to the study of FDI coming from one specific country, i.e. China. Therefore, no comparison and evaluation are made of FDI from other countries, such as the USA or European countries.

By revealing noncommercial objectives and geopolitical ambitions that China pursues through the BRI, the authors derive policy implications for the BRCs, third countries and China.

The study contributes to postcolonial theory and neocolonialism by investigating how China uses financial and economic means to achieve noncommercial objectives and pursue geopolitical ambitions. Additionally, the authors enhance the understanding of FDI by highlighting more subtle aspects of the complex and contextual nature of FDI as a social phenomenon, which have been overlooked thus far. The authors challenge the predominant positive framing of FDI and provide a counterpoint to the way FDI is often coined.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the attitudes of Russian managers are affected by personal attributes, environmental conditions and also cognitive processes.

Based on social cognitive theory, the authors developed hypotheses and tested them against data collected from 173 Russian managers via an online survey. A linear regression analysis revealed several determinants of ethical attitudes within the Russian context.

The findings suggest that personal values (i.e. political orientation), environmental conditions (i.e. hierarchical level, ownership – state-owned versus private – of the current employer, industry in which a manager works) as well as cognitive processes (i.e. the presence (absence) of multilingualism at the workplace) strongly affect ethical attitudes of Russian managers in several issues related to both job ethics (relations inside the organization) and business ethics (relations outside the organization).

Revealing a positive effect of multilingualism as cognitive process on managers' ethical attitudes, this study calls for incorporating a second lingua franca, for example, English, within the working context.

The study provides an in-depth investigation of the determinants of ethical attitudes in Russia. Conducting a single-country study, the authors are able to reveal locally meaningful determinants that may otherwise be overlooked.

Self-inflicted crises (SIC)– either intentionally induced or at least carelessly accepted – can tremendously damage a corporation’s reputation and legitimacy in the eyes of the stakeholders. While academia usually advices companies to accept full responsibility, practice shows that by far not all companies rely on such a responsible strategy. In practice, corporations choose various response strategies ranging from apologies, over diminishing approaches to full denials. By investigating a large data set embracing several countries and industries covering 696 cases of SIC, the authors analyze how corporations respond to such events and compare these response strategies across countries and types of crises.

This book chapter follows a domain-spanning approach by combining corporate social responsibility (CSR), crisis management, and stakeholder management to investigate how companies aim at solving crises. Drawing on attribution theory and situational crisis communication theory, the results reveal that corporations often do not follow the prevailing recommendation to take responsibility. The authors find that in the majority of cases, internationally active corporations try to deny or diminish their responsibility for the crises. Hence, the findings suggest that the concept of CSR is not working in the case of SIC since not only the existence of such corporate behavior but also the use of denial and diminish strategies contradicts the idea of corporate responsibility. Moreover, the authors shed light on possible differences and preferences toward a specific response strategy between countries and between different types of crises.

The authors contribute to the growing literature in the field of crisis management and crisis response strategies by investigating a large data set embracing several countries and industries. In this regard, the study differs from previous qualitative studies and experimental research as it is based on a large cross-country and cross-company set of secondary data. Thereby, the study allows drawing conclusions for a wide range of corporations and countries, hence increasing its general applicability.

Crises are often studied in international business (IB) research as the external “context” for business strategies, but firms can also be active participants in the unfolding of crises. The study of crises in IB could benefit greatly from studying the role of multinational enterprises (MNEs) as active participants, rather than as mere passive actors, responding to exogenous events. History shows that IB crises typically unfold partially as exogenous processes, and partly as the result of MNE strategies. A multilevel and longitudinal approach to studying crises in IB is clearly necessary. This chapter considers the extent to which smaller events that preceded the present crisis – since 1989 – point to systemic problems in global governance. It also defines five overlapping lenses through which future IB studies can further create relevant insights on how to deal with crises: historic, macro, meso, micro and exogenous. The chapter finally serves as an introduction to the whole Progress in International Business Research volume by indicating the relevance of all parts and chapters that follow.

Downloading and uploading offer labour‐saving advantages and are now accepted as useful options in online searching. All aspects are here considered, from recent technical advances, applications and legal attitudes. There is also a review of current software for downloading. Recent developments mean a trend to higher internal memory and storage capacity, and greater transmission speeds. Packages now offer access to more than one host, give maximum assistance to the user without being menu‐driven and incorporate the latest developments in artificial intelligence. Disadvantages are in the length of time involved in the process and the fact that the legal issue of copyright has not yet been finalised. Database producers have turned to licensing under contract law, but there is still need to rely on user ethics, and the need for a standard permissions form is highlighted.

This paper surveys theoretical and practical issues associated with a particular type of information retrieval problem, namely that where the information need is pictorial. The paper is contextualised by the notion of a visually stimulated society, in which the ease of record creation and transmission in the visual medium is contrasted with the difficulty of gaining effective subject access to the world's stores of such records. The technological developments which, in casting the visual image in electronic form, have contributed so significantly to its availability are reviewed briefly, as a prelude to the main thrust of the paper. Concentrating on still and moving pictorial forms of the visual image, the paper dwells on issues related to the subject indexing of pictorial material and discusses four models of pictorial information retrieval corresponding with permutations of the verbal and visual modes for the representation of picture content and of information need.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the application of project management principles to retrospective conversion of a library catalogue and to share the experience with other libraries.

Presents the case of retrospective conversion involving the conversion of card catalogue records and the serials automation at the Faculty of Engineering and Technology Library of the University of Botswana.

Highlights project management concepts as a means of managing library projects for the optimum benefit of the institution, staff and patrons.

The project involved the conversion of 10,000 manual records and the automation of 250 current journals.

Identifies constraints such as staffing, training and retraining; equipment malfunction and access to online resources; and conflict of work priorities.

A case study of project management applications in academic libraries. Both projects involved project scheduling, staff training, scheduling of duties, and writing of in‐house manuals, all based on project management principles.