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This theoretical and empirical study applies complexity theory tenets to deepen understanding, explanation, and prediction of how configurations of national cultures and need motivations influence national entrepreneurial and innovation behavior and nations’ quality of life (QOL). Also, the study examines whether or not high national ethical behavior is sufficient for indicating nations high in quality of life. Applying core tenets of complexity theory, the study constructs asymmetric, case-based (nations), explanation, and predictive models of cultures’ consequences (via Schwartz’s seven value dimensions) and implicit need motivations (via McClelland’s three need motivations) indicating national entrepreneur and innovation activities and subsequent national quality of life and ethical behavior. The study includes testing configuration models empirically for predictive accuracy. The empirical examination is for a set of data for 24 nations in Asia, Europe, North and South America, and the South Pacific. The findings confirm the usefulness of applying complexity theory to learn how culture and motivation configurations support versus have negative consequences on nations’ entrepreneurship, innovation, and human well-being. Nurturing of entrepreneur activities supports the nurturing of enterprise innovation activity, and their joint occurrence indicates nations achieving high quality of life. The findings advance the perspective that different sets of cultural value configurations indicate nations high versus low in entrepreneur and innovation activities. High entrepreneur activities without high innovation activity are insufficient for achieving high national quality of life. Achieving high ethical behavior supports high quality of life. This study is one of the first to apply complexity theory tenets in the field of entrepreneurship research. The study here advances the perspective that case-based asymmetric modeling of recipes is necessary to explain and predict

This paper reports on findings from an ethnographic study of international student adjustment. It also recommends the use of ethnography as a way to research the experiences of tourists and migrants to build up a body of knowledge on the outcome of cross-cultural contact for these two groups. The aim of my ethnographic study was to capture the adjustment journey of a group of international postgraduate students at a university in the South of England. The ethnographic approach involved regular in-depth individual interviews with thirteen students of different nationalities and overt participant observation of the entire postgraduate cohort of 150 students. Research began on the first day of induction in September 2003 and ended in October 2004 upon completion and submission of the Masters dissertation. Students’ experience of adjustment to academic and sociocultural life was therefore captured from arrival in the new country to the return home one full year later. This study finds that stress was at its height in the initial stage of the academic sojourn; the struggle to cope with the challenges of foreign language use and an unfamiliar academic and the sociocultural environment at a time when students were beset with homesickness and loneliness are the causes of this stress. An association was made between the passage of time and a gradual decrease in acculturative stress; however, this was not a generalizable process; there was not only fluctuation in experience across the student body but also in the individual’s subjective sense of success across different aspects of life in the new country. This leads to a conceptualisation the adjustment journey as an unpredictable and dynamic process, which is experienced differently among sojourners, and fluctuates throughout the sojourn as a result of a host of individual, cultural and external factors. The relevance of this study to tourism scholars comes from drawing parallels between the long-stay tourist and the interna