It is with great pleasure that I introduce this special issue of the Journal of Comparative International Management (JCIM), dedicated to examining new business models and management strategies in the global wine industry. This special issue exemplifies the journal’s commitment to advancing our understanding of contemporary international management issues through rigorous comparative analysis across diverse national and institutional contexts.
This study examines how winery tourism contributes to broader tourism competitiveness across France, South Africa, and Romania using a multiscalar framework that integrates national indicators, sectoral tourism activity, and firm-level data. The analysis reveals a clear disconnect between overall tourism rankings and niche performance: South Africa emerges as a leading wine tourism destination despite a relatively low national tourism ranking, France underperforms in winery tourism despite its global tourism leadership, and Romania shows growing potential as an emerging market despite infrastructure constraints. The findings extend traditional competitiveness theory by emphasizing multilevel dynamics, policy-responsive factor conditions, and feedback effects through which niche-sector success can enhance national tourism branding. Practically, the study underscores the value of targeting high-potential tourism niches and adopting more granular performance metrics, offering a more inclusive and forward-looking model of tourism competitiveness that captures innovation and specialization alongside national capacity.
Storytelling has been successfully utilized since the beginning of humankind, long before writing was developed to make stories available longer and to a broader audience. In business, brands are based on stories and therefore the narratives are intended to strengthen market positioning and pricing. In the wine business, offering a luxury product that requires a high level of involvement due to its relative price and the need for a certain connoisseurship, storytelling plays a fundamental role in marketing. An explorative assessment deploying quantitative content analysis of the narratives of German and Austrian wineries screening more than 1,600 wineries provided evidence of a common narrative. The identified key words and narratives speak for prevalence of product-centrism and closeness across all wineries but regional profiling, again with strong reliance on legitimacy. Customer-centric and differentiating storytelling falls short.
This study reconceptualizes luxury consumption as a knowledge-based and emotionally engaged process of distinction. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital and habitus, it adopts the concept of epistemic capital, the social and symbolic value derived from consumers’ ability to acquire, interpret, and authentically perform knowledge. Using an interpretive qualitative design, 28 in-depth interviews with luxury wine consumers in New Zealand and the United States were analysed through reflexive thematic analysis. Findings reveal a developmental continuum of epistemic distinction encompassing three consumer types, Mimic, Metamorphose, and Maestro, that trace the transformation from performed taste to symbolic mastery. This progression is driven by the interaction between objective (factual expertise) and subjective (self-perceived confidence) knowledge facilitated by emotional engagement and experiential learning. As consumers advance along this path, their habitus evolves from imitation toward reflexive authenticity, culminating in embodied fluency where luxury becomes a practice of self-cultivation rather than display. The study contributes to luxury consumption literature by positioning epistemic capital as a dynamic extension of cultural capital that shapes the relationship between knowledge, emotion, and authenticity. It reframes luxury as a process of learning, feeling, and becoming, rather than one of mere acquisition or display. Managerially, it highlights opportunities for brands to foster long-term value through knowledge co-creation and emotional resonance, enabling consumers to transform consumption into symbolic mastery and personal growth.
This study investigates the non-linear relationship between corruption and human development and examines how government budget transparency moderates this nexus across 119 economies spanning a period from 2010 to 2021. Using Prais–Winsten and Hansen’s (2000) panel threshold regression techniques, the analysis reveals that corruption negatively affects human development, with the adverse impact intensifying at higher levels of corruption—supporting the “sand the wheels” hypothesis. Furthermore, strong budget transparency mitigates this negative effect, indicating that transparency, public participation, and oversight enhance development outcomes even in high-corruption contexts. The study contributes to the literature by uncovering the threshold effects of corruption and demonstrating the moderating role of fiscal transparency in promoting human development. The study advances the “sand the wheels” theory of corruption by demonstrating that its adverse effects on human development are non-linear, that is, the marginal harm increases as corruption intensifies.
