Search results

This study examines the impact of China's trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) on Africa's global value chain (GVC) participation and economic upgrading.

The study covered 48 African countries, cutting across the western, eastern, central, southern and northern subregions to cover the heterogeneity of the continent. The study adopted feasible generalized least squares panel VAR-Granger causality Wald test and system generalized methods of moments techniques for estimation.

Overall, China's FDI to Africa and US-Africa trade have a linear relationship with Africa's GVC involvement and economic upgrading. The findings suggest that although China-Africa trade has a positive impact on GVC engagement and upgrading, the marginal effect decreases in the face of US-Africa and EU-Africa trade.

This study provides new evidence on the impact of China's FDI and trade on African economies' GVC participation and economic upgrading. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to empirically explore the effects of China's FDI and trade on Africa's GVC integration and economic upgrading as well as from the perspectives of backward and forward GVC participation. Furthermore, the study empirically examines whether the effects of Africa's economic cooperation with China relative to its GVC engagement differ from those of Europe (EU) and the US via a comparative regression.

This study aims to understand the motivations behind using Airbnb as a collaborative housing platform brand, their impact on satisfaction and engagement, and how the latter affects brand electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM) and brand loyalty. It also analyzes the potential moderating effect of the use intensity of collaborative housing platforms for the proposed causal relationships.

An online survey was addressed to active users of Airbnb with a final sample of 405 users. Data were analyzed using a covariance-based structural equation modeling (SEM) to test the causal model and a multigroup SEM to test the moderator effect of the intensity of use.

The results show that convenience affects brand satisfaction and hedonic motivation influences brand engagement, and both affect return intention and eWOM. In contrast, sustainability motivations seem unrelated both with satisfaction and engagement. Furthermore, the mechanism by which people reach loyalty in terms of return intention varies according to their usage intensity. Thus, the engagement–intention way is stronger for more intensive brand users. In contrast, the satisfaction–intention mechanism is significantly stronger for those with more sporadic use.

The management of collaborative housing platforms should promote tools and actions that favor enjoyment and fun since they increase engagement. On the other hand, it should be interesting to communicate the idea of the convenience of the applications, such as availability for a great offer, ease of contracting, or saving time, since this type of motivation directly correlates with customer satisfaction.

The motivational and behavioral heterogeneity demonstrated in this research can make it easier for people to be reached through different communication strategies and arguments both by the collaborative housing platforms and by public agencies with interests in city tourism management.

Given the rapid development in artificial intelligence (AI), the hotel industry is deploying AI-based systems. In line with this important development, this study aims to examine the impact of trust in the hotel and AI-related performance ambiguity on consumers’ engagement with AI-based systems. This study ultimately examined the impact of engagement on consumers’ intentions to stay in hotels offering such systems, and intentions to tip.

This study developed a conceptual model based on the social cognition theory. The study used an online survey methodology and collected data from a nationwide sample of 400 hotel consumers from the USA. The data analysis was conducted with structural equation modeling.

Consumers’ engagement is strongly influenced by their trust in the hotel but not by performance ambiguity associated with AI. In turn, engagement strongly influenced consumers’ intentions to stay in hotels that have such systems and their intentions to tip.

As AI systems capable of making decisions for consumers are becoming increasingly present in hotels, little is known about the way consumers engage with such systems and whether their engagement leads to economic impact. This is the first study that validated a model that explains intentions to stay and tip for services facilitated by autonomous AI-based systems that can make decisions for consumers.

鉴于人工智能领域的快速发展, 酒店业正在部署基于人工智能的系统。为此, 本研究探讨了客人对酒店的信任和与AI相关的性能模糊性对消费者与基于AI的系统互动的影响。最终, 本研究考察了参与度对客人在提供此类系统的酒店住宿意愿和小费意愿的影响。

本研究基于社会认知理论开发了一个概念模型。研究采用在线调查方法, 从美国全国范围的400名酒店消费者中收集数据, 并采用结构方程建模进行数据分析。

消费者的参与度受酒店的信任强烈影响, 但不受与AI相关的性能模糊性的影响。反过来, 参与度强烈影响了消费者在提供此类系统的酒店住宿和给小费的意愿。

随着能够代表消费者做出决策的人工智能（AI）系统在酒店中日益普及, 人们对消费者如何与这类系统互动以及他们的互动是否会产生经济影响知之甚少。这是第一项验证了一个可以解释在自主的基于AI系统的服务下住宿和给小费意愿的模型的研究。

This article examines the ways in which the popular music industry markets artists through integrated transmedia marketing campaigns. These campaigns unfold across multiple media and create multiple pathways for audience engagement, particularly fan engagement, across social media platforms. The purpose is to further theorise the relationship between artists, the music industry and audiences.

The study used digital ethnography to scrutinise the activities within a contemporary music transmedia marketing campaign, focusing on the release of Taylor Swift's album Reputation as an illustrative case.

The study demonstrates how strategically curated activities encompass platforms' affordances and industry events by making use of fan engagement across social media platforms and streaming services. Fans shift through platforms, as well as across digital and physical spaces, through defined marketing activities at specific times. This article proposes the concept of choreographed engagement to specifically address the ways in which the temporal and spatial aspects of social media marketing are used at the intersection of platform logic, algorithm economy and fan engagement to reach wider audiences.

By proposing the concept of choreographed engagement, the authors bridge the gap between fan practices and marketing practices, providing insight into how commodification of fan engagement is utilised spatially and temporally within the contemporary platform economy. Choreographed engagement constitutes a significant aspect of strategic communication and marketing. The term expands the vocabulary used in the debate on the commodification of artistic work, and audience engagement in the platform era.

Purpose: This chapter investigates the current skill gap in small-scale industries, the need for skill development and digital training in micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSME), and reviews policies for skill development and solutions.

Need for the Study: While the legislature and organisations have initiated various considerations for the successful implementation of the Skill Development System in the country’s MSMEs, there are significant challenges that must be addressed quickly to fill the skill gap in workers in this digital era.

Research Methodology: Secondary data has been used for the chapter review. Analysis has been done based on review data from women handloom and handicraft workers in the micro or craft industry who received a Star rating from the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) partners in Lucknow. For data collection, a questionnaire based on random sampling was used. The data were analysed using a rudimentary weighted average and a percentage technique.

Findings: The studies provide answers to some fundamental problems: are small industry employees indeed mobilised to be skilled outside the official schooling system? Is the training delivery mechanism adequate to prepare pupils for employment? Would industries be willing to reduce minimum qualification criteria to foster skill development?

Practical Implication: Non-technical aptitudes digital and soft skills for workers in this sector should be emphasised in MSMEs, and significant reforms in MSME sectors and capacity-building education and training programmes should be implemented in the Indian industry to generate small and medium enterprises production and employment.

Social media facilitates the communication and the relationship between healthcare professionals and patients. However, limited research has examined the role of social media in a physicians' online return. This study, therefore, investigates physicians' online economic and social capital return in relation to physicians' use of social media and consumer engagement.

Using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression with fixed effects (FE) and panel data collected from Sina Weibo and Sina Health, this study analyzes the impact of physicians' social media use and consumer engagement on physicians' online return and the moderation effect of professional seniority.

The results reveal that physicians' use of social media and consumer sharing behavior positively affect physicians' online economic return. In contrast, consumer engagement positively impacts physicians' online social capital return. While professional seniority enhances the effect of physicians' social media use on online economic return, professional seniority only enhances the relationship between consumers' sharing behavior to the posts and physicians' online social capital return when professional seniority comes to consumer engagement.

This study reveals the different roles of social media use and consumer engagement in physicians' online return. The results also extend and examine the social media affordances theory in online healthcare communities and social media platforms.

The aim of this research was to understand how governmental stakeholder engagement facilitates the sustainability of industrial engineering (IE) projects. A model for governmental stakeholder engagement activities is presented.

The authors relied on a single-case study of a mining project in Northern Europe, where a novel collaboration and engagement approach with governmental stakeholders was piloted in the project's front-end phase. The analysis focused on the collaborative practices through which the IE project investor engaged governmental stakeholders during the project's front-end phase and how the engagement contributed to solving challenges in the early planning and permitting process and achieving project plans that balanced economic, social and environmental aspects.

The findings show how four collaborative engagement practices reduced uncertainty and equivocality related to the legal sustainability requirements, enabled the development of sustainable design solutions and overall accelerated the permitting process without compromising the quality of final project plans.

The findings can be used to plan governmental stakeholder engagement and understand related challenges that need to be overcome. The study highlights the need to develop established practices and guidelines for governmental stakeholder engagement.

This study complements prior research on stakeholder engagement and project sustainability by developing an understanding of how governmental stakeholder engagement can be a key mechanism enabling the sustainability of IE project's end product. This research contributes to stakeholder theory by elaborating on a new stakeholder role, intermediary stakeholder.

University–industry (UI) collaboration is essential for knowledge and technology exchange between higher education institutions and industries, enabling enterprises to accelerate innovation. However, few studies have investigated the collaborative innovation mechanism through which UI collaboration can enhance the accumulation of firms' intellectual capital (IC) and how this, in turn, affects their innovation-driven development.

Drawing from the knowledge management and collaborative innovation theory, this research proposes a theoretical framework of the inter-organization relationship between enterprises and universities to investigate the influence mechanism of UI collaboration, including academic engagement and commercialization, on corporate performance as well as the mediating role of IC by employing survey that covers 177 UI collaborations.

Empirical results show that human capital and relational capital fully mediate the relationship between academic engagement UI collaboration and corporate economic performance, while human capital partially mediates the relationship between commercialization UI collaboration and corporate economic performance. Additionally, structural capital and relational capital partially mediate the relationship between academic engagement and corporate innovation performance, while structural capital fully mediates the relationship between commercialization and corporate innovation performance.

This study empirically investigates how academic engagement and commercialization impact corporate performance (i.e. innovation dimension or economic dimension). It uncovers this relationship's underlying mechanism by documenting the IC's mediating impact.

The purpose of this paper is to improve the understanding of the applicability of employee engagement theories in a South Asian country, Sri Lanka, and determine whether engagement theories are universally applicable beyond the Western countries in which they have been developed and tested.

A heterogeneous sample of 451 private-sector employees in Sri Lanka was used. A mixed-method design was adopted; quantitative findings were compared with previous studies conducted in Western countries, and qualitative findings enabled a more nuanced understanding of employee engagement in the Sri Lankan context.

Despite cultural differences between Sri Lanka and Western countries, the antecedents of engagement did not manifest differently in a consistent way. Combined results suggest that the different manifestations of engagement in Sri Lanka cannot be attributed solely to cultural variance.

The authors used cross-sectional data and tested only four antecedents of engagement.

This study highlights the importance of multinational organisations' awareness of how employee engagement manifests across different contexts and going beyond cultural adaptation when developing context-specific engagement strategies.

This is among the first studies on an Asian country to examine whether cultural differences impact the antecedents of engagement to empirically test Kahn's (1990) theory of engagement and the motivational process of the job demands-resources theory in a single study and to use a heterogeneous sample and mixed-methods design. The authors challenge the centrality of national culture as a determinant of employee engagement and highlight the importance of considering other contextual factors when examining employee engagement in different countries.