Intelligent Data Mining based Method for Efficient English Teaching and Cultural Analysis

The emergence of online education helps improving the traditional English teaching quality greatly. However, it only moves the teaching process from offline to online, which does not really change the essence of traditional English teaching. In this work, we mainly study an intelligent English teaching method to further improve the quality of English teaching. Specifically, the random forest is firstly used to analyze and excavate the grammatical and syntactic features of the English text. Then, the decision tree based method is proposed to make a prediction about the English text in terms of its grammar or syntax issues. The evaluation results indicate that the proposed method can effectively improve the accuracy of English grammar or syntax recognition.

Britain in Latin America

In the 19th century, foreigners had unprecedented access to Spanish America, as the newly independent nations welcomed travelers as readily as they accepted foreign loans and investment capital. Britons were able to freely travel into the South American interior, and commercial ties between Britain and Latin America grew quickly. Cultural and economic exchanges proceeded in two major waves: the first occurred during and in the immediate aftermath of the Wars of Independence, and then, after a cooling-off period, during the second half of the century, when infrastructural and technological advances opened up the Latin American hinterlands to capitalist expansion. International trade grew after 1850, along with Britain’s role in Latin American culture. Britain remained the hegemonic foreign power in Latin America until the First World War. These relationships left their mark on both British and Latin American literatures. In addition to a vast number of travel books about Latin American countries by adventurers, explorers, and tourists, British poets, novelists, philosophers, and historians also drew inspiration from this still relatively unknown territory. Toward the end of the 20th century, Victorian studies began to focus more insistently on British and Latin American exchanges, often making use of historical analyses that interpreted the British-Latin American relationship in terms of dependency theory and world-systems theory. These analyses have generally characterized Britain’s enormous economic, cultural, and political influence in terms of informal imperialism, a strategy for establishing domination over a territory without ruling it directly; however, the nature of British imperialism in Latin America, and its implications for cultural analysis, remain much debated. Currently, literary studies of Britain’s role in Latin America, and Latin America’s role within the British literary imaginary, constitute a large and growing body of scholarship. This bibliographic introduction offers an overview of important texts produced in the 19th century, as well as major currents of scholarship in literary studies and related humanities disciplines.

Cause-related marketing: a systematic review of the literature

Cause-Related Marketing (CRM) is one of the most versatile activities among the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives. Though CRM is extensively researched, however, only a few authors have performed systematic literature reviews on CRM. Therefore, more systematic reviews of CRM are still needed to complete and bring together the more contributions, advances, and different existing research lines. Thus, this paper provides a comprehensive overview of the existing literature in CRM from the two keywords: “Cause-Related Marketing” and “Cause Marketing”, and the time period ranges from 1988 to 2020. In this study, rigorous protocol is used in synthesizing 344 English articles drawing upon e-journal database searches. These articles were categorized by time-wise development, country-wise development, methodological development, cross-cultural analysis, the role of journals. This study also carried out the Bibliometric Analyses. The review highlights that the concept of CRM has evolved from being considered a marketing mix tool (a promotion tool), to being considered as a CSR initiative, with a more strategic character. Our findings revealed that only a few journals published articles on CRM. Geographically, the CRM study was initiated in North America, followed by Europe and Oceania, and Asian and Sub-Saharan African countries. From the third decade, there was more collaboration in cross-cultural studies and the use of mixed-method (qualitative and quantitative studies) approach. Lastly, this study shows the most manifest research gaps in CRM that opens avenue for future research.

Gender, Sexuality, and Religion: A Critical Integrative Review and Agenda for Future Research

This article sets forth a critical integrative review of the study of gender, sexuality, and religion. Treating religion as a cause, an effect, and an intermediary factor in relation to gender and sexuality, it draws on and synthesizes multiple theoretical approaches including gender and queer lenses on religion, cultural analysis, and intersectionality. The article is structured around ten big-picture questions about gender, sexuality, and religion and argues that gender and sexuality are a key symbolic boundary and cultural divide in religious and political life in the United States and around the world. It concludes with an agenda for future research.

Do connoisseur consumers care about sustainability? Exploring coffee consumption practices through netnography

PurposeThe coffee industry has experienced two major trends: the development of connoisseur consumption of specialty coffee and the importance of sustainability. Despite the increasing concomitant relevance of both trends, literature on how sustainability has been interlacing with connoisseur consumption is rather limited. Therefore, this paper aims to analyse how connoisseur consumers (CC) integrate sustainability into their coffee consumption practices.Design/methodology/approachThe paper adopts a qualitative netnographic approach through an interpretive cultural analysis of specialty coffee bloggers narratives, conceived as a specific sub-group of CC that tend to be particularly active on social media.FindingsThrough the lens of social practice theories, the study reveals that CC are likely to implement and perceive sustainability very differently from the dominant mass market as subject to the influence of their shared rituals, values, norms and symbolic meanings. Such findings are relevant under a managerial perspective as they also generate insights on how to foster environmentally friendly practices in coffee consumers as well as on how to create more sustainable marketing strategies.Originality/valueThe study contributes to the literature on coffee consumption behaviour and sustainability. First, by analysing actual behaviours rather than intended, the study offers an alternative approach to the dominant paradigm of linear decisions models in the study of sustainable consumption. Second, because CC possess a unique consumption style, different from the mainstream market, the analysis has led towards the identification of alternative sustainable consumption patterns and enablers.

Developing a Research Method to Analyze Visual Literacy Based on Cross-Cultural Characteristics

This chapter presents a new approach of a quantitative analysis used to research the understanding of visual literacy issues. The objective of the research is to find common patterns, opinions, and behaviors between different people regarding the use of visual communication and people's state of visual literacy, while also considering the possible cultural differences related. To explain visual literacy and its implications, the theoretical background about the visual literacy research field is presented first. Then, also within the section on background, the chapter presents the main concepts related to culture, and how it and visual literacy can be analyzed together to enable cross-cultural analysis. To conduct these cross-cultural analyses, this chapter proposes a new kind of quantitative questionnaire-based instrument that includes a section to measure the cultural characteristics of the individual and their level of literacy. This instrument proposal is the main result, since the research field of visual literacy lacks this kind of quantitative approach.

Psychological and Cultural Analysis of Attitude to Entrepreneurship in Russia and China

The article considers the attitude to entrepreneurial activity and entrepreneurs as a social group in society, which is one of the factors of formation of economic self-determination of entrepreneurs at the present time, from the position of interdisciplinary approach in the context of historical, cultural, psychological analyses. The values of Chinese and Russian business culture were influenced by traditional religious attitudes in these countries. Theoretical analysis showed that in Chinese culture the attitude to entrepreneurship was more stable and positive, the basis of entrepreneurship is rationality, pragmatism, compliance with social hierarchy. Incoherent images are rather inherent for the Russian culture; thus, the stereotype of the entrepreneur was endowed with negative qualities, both in pre-revolutionary times, and in the Soviet period, changes towards positive side emerged only in the 2000s. The article summarizes the empirical data on the prevailing value judgments regarding such economic categories as wealth, poverty, money, as well as the formed stereotypical images of the entrepreneur. According to Russian respondents, a positive and rational attitude to money dominates, but along with positive associations, the negative ones are vividly expressed, such as: dependence, cynicism, conflict, hopelessness, retrenchment, need, quarrels, crisis, etc. From the Chinese respondents’ point of view, money and wealth are values, on which status and credibility depend, and are associated with nobility and humanity. According to Russian and Chinese respondents, the stereotype of the mo­dern entrepreneur is characterized by the following qualities: respectful for people, communicative, cooperative, critical thinking, selective, rather independent, serious, intelligent.

Historical identity in the coordinate system of world development

The purpose of the article is to conceptualize the phenomena of «ethnic» and «national» identity and to determine the vectors of their development. Research methods are based on the fundamental principles of historical and cultural analysis. The methodological core of the research is a comparative analysis of ethnic and national identities in the chronotype as complex sociocultural systems. The scientific novelty lies in the conceptualization of the ethnonational identity dichotomy through the prism of the cultural code. It is substantiated that in the conditions of modern modernization, the ratio between the ethnic and national components of identity depends on the direction of their development vectors: a) when the vectors are parallel and equally oriented (for example, one of the ethnic communities monopolizes power), there is a reduction of national identity to ethnic one; b) when the vectors are parallel, but oppositely oriented (for example, when an ethnic community seeks to recognize its right to political self-determination), national identity collides with the interests of the ethnic community, entering into confrontation with it. Conclusions. Within the framework of constructivism, the phenomenon of ethnic identity is analyzed as a social construct and the factors of deviation from this model are revealed (in particular, adaptation to the environment, acculturation, violation of the demographic balance between different groups), causing its variability. The systemic characteristics and the main conceptual components of national identity (internal and external) are analyzed, factors of the weakening of social ties due to the processes of globalization, the growth of entropy, and information expansion in society are identified. Typical models of interaction of ethnic and national identities are considered. Keywords: ethnic identity, national identity, cultural code, ethnos, nation.