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This study aims to critically discuss and reorient the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) debate toward the idea of addressing and rectifying the pervasive structural inequalities that DEI, in its undiluted form rooted in social justice (SJ), aims to combat. Drawing on Bourdieu, the study first examines the diffusion and contestation of DEI into international business (IB). It then proposes a Bourdieu-inspired agenda to advance the transposition of SJ principles into IB.

The study interpretively reconstructs the process of DEI’s ideational diffusion. It examines how the interplay between ideas and field dynamics in IB shapes ideational processes and outcomes.

In response to rising global inequalities – to which multinational enterprises (MNEs) have significantly contributed – SJ movements have propelled DEI into the wider social and political arena, including corporate boardrooms. Within IB, a diluted version of DEI – IB-DEI – emerged as a paradigm to improve MNEs’ performance, but failed to address underlying structural inequalities. As the social impacts, utility and legitimacy of DEI have been challenged, the DEI debate has come to a flux. The study proposes conceptual and contextual extension of DEI within IB and advancing socially engaged research and practice that help reinforce DEI’s core SJ purpose – tackling structural inequalities.

The study is one of the few to openly tackle SJ-IB contradictions on DEI, while advancing the application of Bourdieu to critical studies of IB.

This chapter explores how the development of football fandom for the Chinese national team and local football clubs is strongly associated with societal changes. Although the performances of Chinese football teams, especially the national team, have failed to impress the world, football remains the most popular because of millions of supporters with loyalty and passion. Most studies related to fans mainly focus on the economic and political implications of spectatorship along with the rise of China. Nevertheless, few articles are available to answer the fundamental questions, such as ‘When did these supporters come out?’ and ‘What were the factors of the development of fandom?’. By going through archival records and published documents over the last decades, this chapter offers a comprehensive and historical analysis of the development of football fandom in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and deals with these unanswered questions. As such, this chapter does not intend to be the most authoritative one but is one of the rare sources to lay down the foundation for research on Chinese football fandom. Furthermore, this chapter also proves that studies on football fandom can be a useful window for observing Chinese society.

Sport organizations hold substantial ideological power to showcase and reinforce dominant cultural ideas about gender. The organization and portrayal of sporting events and spaces continue to promote and reinforce a hierarchical gender binary where heroic forms of masculinity are both desired and privileged. Such publicly visible gender hierarchies contribute to the doing of gender beyond sport itself, extending to influence gender power relations within sport and non-sport organizations. Yet, there has been a relative absence of scholarship on sport organizations within the organizational sociology field. In this paper, we review findings of studies that look at how formal and informal organizational dimensions influence the doing and undoing of gender in sport organizations. Subsequently, we call for scholars to pay more attention to sport itself as a source of gendered organizational practices within both sport and non-sport organizations. We end with suggestions for research that empirically explores this linkage by focusing on innovative theoretical perspectives that could provide new insights on gender inclusion in organizations.

To advance understanding of transparency by problematising the motivations and strategies of a so far underexplored group: its users.

We explore the relationship between blindness, visibility, and transparency by drawing on our analysis of Max Frisch’s experimental novel Gantenbein (1964), in which the protagonist lives a life of feigned blindness.

The accounting scholarly debate on transparency has neglected the users of transparency. We address this through a novel theorisation of transparency as a game, highlighting some of its distinctive features and paradoxes.

By theorising the transparency game we move beyond concerns with what transparency reveals or conceals and conceptualise the motivations and strategies of the players engaged in this game. We show how different players have something to gain from the transparency game and warn of its emancipatory limits.

Information transparency is an important factor in enhancing trust and promoting interfirm cooperation. By combining transaction cost theory and institutional theory, this study aims to examines whether host-country firms’ information transparency prompt multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) to choose the joint venture entry mode for outward foreign direct investment (OFDI).

Using Heckman two-stage estimation method, this study examines Chinese listed manufacturing firms for the period 2014–2019.

The findings indicate that the higher the information transparency of host-country firms, the higher the possibility of MNEs choosing the joint venture entry mode for OFDI. This study further finds that the positive relationship between host country firms’ information transparency and the possibility of choosing the joint venture entry mode is enhanced by institutional distance, but weakened by MNEs’ host-country experience.

How to choose the appropriate entry mode of OFDI in the internationalization strategy is an important issue for MNEs to consider. As the postpandemic world is characterized by increased global risks, decoupling of economies, disruption of global value chains and the retreat of globalization (Contractor and Cantwell, 2022), how to further strengthen cooperation, reduce the cost and risk of MNEs and truly realize common construction and sharing is one of the hot issues in both practice and research.

Drawing on a theoretical framework of sustainable career ecosystem theory, our paper aims to consider how domestic and international postgraduates can enhance their employability through participation in a landscape of practice.

The study employed an exploratory, longitudinal case study design to capture students' lived experiences on an 18-month Master of Professional Practice course at a higher education institution in New Zealand. The data collection procedure involved field note observations (months 1–4), a focus group (month 13) and narrative frames (months 16–18). The sample was domestic students from New Zealand (n = 2) and international students from Asia (n = 5).

One’s participation in multiple communities of practice represents their landscape of practice and a commitment to lifewide learning. Through participation in various communities of practice, domestic and international students can enhance their employability in three ways: (1) boundary encounters to develop social capital, (2) transcending contexts to enhance cultural capital, and (3) acknowledging the development of psychological capital and career agency.

Our work offers one of the earliest empirical validations of sustainable career ecosystem theory. Expressly, communities of practice represent various contexts whereby employability capital is developed over time. Additionally, the postgraduate students themselves are portrayed as interconnected and interdependent actors, presenting a novel framing of such dependencies at the micro-level of the ecosystem. The practical implications come from informing universities of the value of a landscape of practice to enhance the employability of domestic and international students in preparation for sustainable careers and to promote the sustainability of the career ecosystem.

This study aims to apply machine learning techniques to efficiently predict leisure firms’ financial performance. Accurate financial forecasting is crucial in leisure and tourism, greatly affecting firms’ strategic decisions and competitive positioning. This study emphasizes the roles of intellectual capital to offer a nuanced understanding of how these types of capital influence firm success.

Using comprehensive firm-level data, this study examines several machine learning algorithms’ predictive capacity across a spectrum of industry sectors (general, manufacturing, service) to identify the most effective model and training dataset. These tools are used to evaluate financial metrics such as return on sales, return on assets and sales growth. A range of variables are incorporated into this process to enhance model accuracy and relevance.

Results demonstrate the support vector machine algorithm’s exceptional performance based on a training data set from the service sector in predicting leisure firms’ return on sales and sales growth. This algorithm is thus an efficacious strategic forecasting instrument. The variables significantly affecting firm performance include demand variation; organizational, product and technological innovation; synergistic innovation between multiple domains; salary levels; market strategy; and the number of employees.

By integrating advanced machine learning techniques with the strategic management of intellectual capital, this study presents a sophisticated approach to predicting leisure firms’ financial performance. Findings enrich the discourse on firm performance forecasting and offer actionable insights into strategic planning and resource allocation for practitioners in the leisure and tourism sectors.

本研究应用机器学习技术来高效预测休闲企业的财务表现。准确的财务预测对于休闲和旅游业至关重要, 极大影响企业的战略决策和竞争定位。本研究强调智力资本的作用, 以深入理解这些资本类型如何影响企业的成功。

本研究使用全面的企业层面数据, 考察多种行业领域（综合、制造、服务）中多个机器学习算法的预测能力, 识别出最有效的模型和训练数据集。这些工具用于评估财务指标, 如销售回报率、资产回报率和销售增长率。过程纳入多种变量, 以提高模型的准确性和相关性。

结果表明, 基于服务行业训练数据集的支持向量机算法在预测休闲企业的销售回报率和销售增长率方面表现出色。因此, 该算法是一种有效的战略预测工具。影响企业绩效的显著变量包括需求变化、组织、产品和技术创新、多领域之间的协同创新、工资水平、市场战略和员工数量。

通过将先进的机器学习技术与智力资本的战略管理相结合, 本研究提出了一种复杂的方法来预测休闲企业的财务表现。研究结果丰富了关于企业绩效预测的讨论, 并为休闲和旅游业的从业者提供了有关战略规划和资源分配的实用见解。