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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to reveal how trust develops between partner firms in the context of intercultural business relationships and how understanding of the business culture of a partner firm and adaptation to it can be a driving force for the beginning and maintaining of trust development with that partner.Design/methodology/approachThe study is of a qualitative nature and employs "elite interviewing" methodology for the aims of data collection. The analysis is conducted through theoretically‐informed reading of interviews.FindingsManagers constantly learn the business culture of the partner through interactions. Adaptation based on the acquired business culture knowledge is found to be as important for the development of trust between business relationships' parties. A "moderate" level of cultural adaptation is identified as most favourable for this development. Additionally, a categorization of cultural adaptation within business relationships is proposed.Research limitations/implicationsThe insufficient number of personal interviews within a specific industrial context does not allow a generalisation of the study outcomes.Originality/valueResearch which addresses the importance of cultural adaptation for trust development within business relationships, is scarce. This study attempts to fill in this gap. Furthermore, it shows the need to consider business culture, rather than national culture, while studying business relationships. Finally, the study provides interesting avenues for further research.

A plethora of environmental problems are ravaging the planet and its inhabitants. How well do existing structures convene governments to address these challenges? What is the role of science and civil society in this context? And, does international cooperation properly support countries with limited capacities? This report seeks to respond to these questions, based on an analysis of actions taken to renew international environmental governance to fulfill commitments made at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in 2012. This report outlines possibilities to strengthen the UN Environment Programme and to enhance synergies among global environmental conventions to ensure that international environmental governance continues evolving and improving to secure human well-being and planetary health.

The article deals with the concept of the social entrepreneurship ecosystem and analyzes existing practices of social entrepreneurship in the northwestern region of Russia. Social entrepreneurship is designed to solve social problems through the use of sustainable economic instruments; social business results in social transformations associated with improving the quality of life of individual social groups and citizens. The state, the social capital, the market for social services and the infrastructure support were identified as the main elements and subjects of the ecosystem. The research is based on federal and regional statistics on the development of the non-governmental sector and social entrepreneurship, data from registers of social service providers, as well as regulatory legal acts on social entrepreneurship. Data analysis was carried out for all the main subjects of the northwestern region (St. Petersburg, Leningrad region, Kaliningrad region, etc.). The study results show that the legal foundations for the development of social entrepreneurship have been developed. There are various measures of state support, including state subsidies, loans, with a fairly wide regional diversity observed. At the same time, at present the non-governmental sector of social services does not fully meet the existing needs. This is reflected in the insufficient number of socially oriented nonprofit organizations and social entrepreneurs, and in the relatively small proportion of the population involved in the non-governmental sector of social services. However, we should note the active development of the infrastructure for training social entrepreneurs, which includes accelerators, a business incubator, information and consulting support for social entrepreneurs.

Articles from the 2nd Meeting of the Association for Ground Stone Tools Research ; The transformation of food ingredients into meals corresponds to complex choices resulting from the interplay of environmental and cultural factors: available ingredients, technologies of transformation, cultural perceptions of food, as well as taste and food taboos. Project PLANTCULT (ERC Consolidator Grant, GA 682529) aims to investigate prehistoric culinary cultures from the Aegean to Central Europe by focusing on plant foods and associated food preparation technologies spanning the Neolithic through to the Iron Age. Our paper offers an overview of the lines of investigation pursued within the project to address plant food preparation and related stone tool technologies. The wide range of plant foods from the area under investigation (ground cereals, breads, beer, pressed grapes, split pulses, etc.) suggests great variability of culinarypreparations. Yet, little is known of the transformation technologies involved (e.g., pounding, grinding, and boiling). Changes in size and shape of grinding stones over time have been associated with efficiency of grinding, specific culinary practices and socioeconomic organisation. Informed by ethnography and experimental data, as well as ancient texts, PLANTCULT integrates archa eobotanical food remains and associated equipment to address these issues. We utilize a multifaceted approach including the study of both published archaeological data and original assemblages from key sites. We aim to develop methods for understanding the interaction of tool type, use-wear formation and associated plant micro- and macro- remains in the archaeological record. Our experimental program aims to generate (a) reference material for the identification of plant processing in the archaeological record and (b) ingredients for the preparation of experimental plant foods, which hold a key role to unlocking the recipes of prehistory. Plant processing technologies are thus investigated across space and through time, in an attempt to explore the dynamic role of culinary transformation of plant ingredients into shaping social and cultural identities in prehistoric Europe. ; The authors wish to thank the following archaeologists for providing ground stone tools for study in the context of project PLANTCULT: Alexander Chohadziev, Areti Chondrogianni-Metoki, Pascal Darcque, Sonia Dimaki, Georgia Karametrou-Mentesidi, Stavros Kotsos, Chaido Koukouli-Chrysanthaki, Dimitra Malamidou, Nikos Merousis, Maria Pappa, Aikaterini Papanthimou, Liana Stefani, Zoi Tsirtsoni, Christina Ziota. This work has been funded by the European Research Council project "PLANTCULT: Identifying the food cultures of ancient Europe", under the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant Agreement No 682529, Consolidator Grant 2016- 2021).

Did the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent recession rearrange the basic structures of the global economy? To answer that fundamental question, the authors of Exploring the Global Financial Crisis tackle a number of related questions: What has happened, for example, to global flows of people, goods, and capital? Will the euro and the dollar persist as global currencies? Can governments that bailed out failing banks by vastly expanding public debt manage to regain solvency, and at what political cost? Ranging across regions, and from the factors that gave birth to the crisis to current politico-economic rivalries, the authors present both mainstream and critical views on the central issues involved