We are currently looking for potential partners for a series of socio-psychological and organizational studies, joining together partners from Western Europe, Eastern Europe (former communist countries from the European area) and Extreme East (former soviet countries from the European and Asian continents). Our second intention is to build a long-term collaborative network – let's name it East-West European Research Group (EVER Group) - that could initiate and conduct cross-cultural research projects on various topics, proposed by different researchers.

The final goal of this endeavor is the dissemination of these outcomes, preferably through publication of articles in ISI listed journals with reasonably-high impact factors, journals that seek well grounded studies, conducted on significant samples from different cultural contexts.

To start with, and as a test of this idea of collaboration, we invite you to join us, as partners, in a research concerning the cultural differences related to the flexibility and permeability of work – family boundaries (for details, see Appendix 1), or in a research regarding cultural differences in the stereotypes and prejudice towards immigrant workers (for details, see Appendix 2).

In these studies, as in the potential succeeding ones, you could get involved in the data collection stage (minimum 350 subjects) or, if you prefer, in writing the journal article. Moreover, you can advance your own research projects for which you are searching for partners in culturally similar or dissimilar countries.

This partnership will respect the APA research norms and principles, and the additional rules of collaboration will be commonly defined. As members or promoters of the studies, we can also suggest particular rules, such as: a) a contribution of minimum 1/3 of the valid data analyzed in the article, automatically grants you the co-author status; b) when writing scientific papers, the authorship order should reflect the weight of individual contributions to the paper in all respects (from design to data collection, analysis, writing, revising etc), c) the proponent of the research project will always be listed as an author, but she/he can decide to withdraw; d)…

If you are interested in this opportunity, we kindly ask you to address us: either (a) to ask questions or formulate suggestions on this initiative, or (b) to confirm your involvement in this first study, or(c) to request your registration as a member of the group, in order to receive information about similar studies.

Hoping that our proposal will be of interest to you,

Sincerely yours,

EVER Group promoters:

Petru CURSEU, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Organization Studies,

Tilburg University, Tilburg, THE NETHERLANDS

Ticu CONSTANTIN, PhD, Professor, Head of Doctoral Studies Department,

Faculty of Psychology and Education, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iasi, ROMANIA