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Studying the cultural dynamics of expatriate amateur theater in Brussels, the purpose of this paper is to investigate multicultural marketplace development in global cities.

The paper performs an interpretive analysis of the expatriate amateur scene from an ethnographic perspective, combining observations of rehearsals and performances, in-depth interviews with actors, directors and audience, and secondary data.

The fluidity of global cities allows their inhabitants to engage in creative processes of cultural experimentation, performing a continuous back-and-forth movement between hybridization and pluralization. The former creates enough homogeneity for the expatriates to feel targeted; the latter ensures a level of cultural diversity necessary to satisfy their cosmopolitan aspirations.

The paper points to the important role of global cities for cultural experimentation. Such cities are not only an interesting market for culturally diverse products, but also experimental hubs. Managers willing to address multicultural marketplaces might target these markets with dynamic cultural offers that ensure a balance between rendering a product globally appreciated and recognizable, and maintaining a cosmopolitan appeal for consumers in search of diversity.

Drawing on global cities as markets in continuous reconstruction and subject to cultural experimentation, the paper turns the attention of the research community to the collective, reflexive, and experimental aspects of symbolic consumption. It shows how arts and cultural products represent valuable contexts for international marketing research, providing original insights into market dynamics and cultural experimentation.

Purpose – In the context of international human mobility and common personal life transformations, this article focuses on the impact of such transformations on emotional attachment to places of origin.

Design/methodology/approach – A combination of phenomenological interviews with 13 Latin American migrants living in Belgium, and poetry composition by the author.

Findings – Drawing on this empirical work, the article illustrates (i) how, after many years of successful international mobility, some migrants still experience, occasionally and with different intensities, a desire to return home – homecoming tendencies; and (ii) how consumption-related activities support consumers in nourishing these personal returning tendencies, therefore enabling them to avoid disappearing from view in the territories from which they departed.

Originality/value – The notion of homecoming tendencies contrasts with that of home maintenance, by demonstrating how preserving one's home in departure lands is also a matter of caring, commitment, and contributing back home. Such gestures are inextricably linked with consumption-related activities such as housing decisions, the adoption and export of cultural ideas, traveling, working, celebrating, all in departure contexts. These activities often involve current inhabitants of those territories, such as local designers, constructors, tourism services providers, colleagues, students, and family members.

This paper aims to illuminate the characteristics of Analytic and Continental scholarship to generate a deeper appreciation for both writing styles in the consumer culture theory (CCT) community.

Two CCT researchers discuss the merits of Analytic and Continental scholarship in an accessible dialogical format.

Analytic ideals of scholarship, espoused by elite academic journals, include conceptual rigor, logical claims, theoretical coherence, researcher agnosticism and broad generalizability. Continental ideals of scholarship, more likely to be espoused by niche and/or critical journals, include creative writing, holistic interpretation, intellectual imagination, political provocation and deep contextualization.

This dialogue may build more understanding across variously oriented scholars, literatures, and journals in the CCT community.

The purpose of this study is to present the overall trend and dynamics in global mergers and acquisitions activity while suggesting future research avenues in this domain. The analysis covers two aspects to examine the main contours of the domain, that is performance analysis followed by thematic cluster analysis.

Bibliometric analysis has been used for examining 1,433 publications extracted from the Scopus database to identify the research trend between 2000 and 2021. With the help of VosViewer (a bibliometric software), bibliographic coupling, citation, co-authorship, keyword and network analysis have been carried out.

The analysis reveals that most of the research on cross-border mergers and acquisitions (CBMA) is concentrated in the context of developed markets, USA and UK being the largest. Most of the research till date is confined to wealth effects, value creation, corporate governance, socio-cultural aspects and various determinants of CBMA, all from the standpoint of the acquirer.

The present study highlights numerous opportunities for future research based on empirical analysis. There exists a dearth of studies around CBMA in the context of emerging nations which provides a relatively unexplored field to carry out research work.

The study makes use of a comprehensive list of keywords to have an extensive analysis. This is a pioneering study that has used bibliographic coupling of documents for content analysis and to the best of authors’ knowledge, no previous works on cross-border acquisitions have performed bibliographic coupling for this.