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Unconventional machining processes, particularly ultrasonic vibration cutting (UVC), can overcome such technical bottlenecks. However, the precise mechanism through which UVC affects the in-service functional performance of advanced aerospace materials remains obscure. This limits their industrial application and requires a deeper understanding.

The surface integrity and in-service functional performance of advanced aerospace materials are important guarantees for safety and stability in the aerospace industry. For advanced aerospace materials, which are difficult-to-machine, conventional machining processes cannot meet the requirements of high in-service functional performance owing to rapid tool wear, low processing efficiency and high cutting forces and temperatures in the cutting area during machining.

To address this literature gap, this study is focused on the quantitative evaluation of the in-service functional performance (fatigue performance, wear resistance and corrosion resistance) of advanced aerospace materials. First, the characteristics and usage background of advanced aerospace materials are elaborated in detail. Second, the improved effect of UVC on in-service functional performance is summarized. We have also explored the unique advantages of UVC during the processing of advanced aerospace materials. Finally, in response to some of the limitations of UVC, future development directions are proposed, including improvements in ultrasound systems, upgrades in ultrasound processing objects and theoretical breakthroughs in in-service functional performance.

This study provides insights into the optimization of machining processes to improve the in-service functional performance of advanced aviation materials, particularly the use of UVC and its unique process advantages.

This study aims to examine whether customer trust is influenced by the congruence and incongruence between customers' perceptions of two types of omnichannel integration—perceived transactional integration (PTI) and perceived relational integration (PRI). The authors further considered the perceived effectiveness of e-commerce institutional mechanisms (PEEIM) as the boundary condition of omnichannel integration's effect.

Drawing upon the stereotype content model, this study hypothesizes the influences of PTI and PRI on customer trust wherein PEEIM moderates the relationships. The research model was empirically examined based on the responses surface analysis of survey data collected from 311 omnichannel customers.

Results showed that when PTI and PRI are congruent, customers are inclined to trust brands that have high levels of PTI and PRI rather than low levels of PTI and PRI. Moreover, the incongruence between PTI and PRI is positively related to customer trust. PEEIM was found to weaken the congruence effect while strengthening the incongruence effect. The authors also examined customer distrust as another relational outcome to provide a robust check.

This study uncovers customer cognition of omnichannel integration and examines the influences on customer trust, therefore contributing to our understanding of omnichannel integration's effect from the customer perspective. Findings from this research provide insights for brand managers on deploying channel integration strategies and institutional mechanisms to manage customer trust.

This study analyzes the evolution of topics related to COVID-19 on Chinese social media platforms with the aim of identifying changes in netizens' concerns during the different stages of the pandemic.

In total, 793,947 posts were collected from Zhihu, a Chinese Question and Answer website, and Dingxiangyuan, a Chinese online healthcare community, from 31 December, 2019, to 4 August, 2021. Topics were extracted during the prodromal and outbreak stages, and in the abatement–resurgence cycle.

Netizens' concerns varied in different stages. During the prodromal and outbreak stages, netizens showed greater concern about COVID-19 news, the impact of COVID-19 and the prevention and control of COVID-19. During the first round of the abatement and resurgence stage, netizens remained concerned about COVID-19 news and the prevention and control of the pandemic, however, less attention was paid to the impact of COVID-19. During later stages, popularity grew in topics concerning the impact of COVID-19, while netizens engaged more in discussions about international events and the raising of spirits to fight the global pandemic.

This study contributes to the practice by providing a way for the government and policy makers to retrospect the pandemic and thereby make a good preparation to take proper measures to communicate with citizens and address their demands in similar situations in the future.

This study contributes to the literature by applying an adapted version of Fink's (1986) crisis life cycle to create a five-stage evolution model to understand the repeated resurgence of COVID-19 in Mainland China.

Safety climate plays an important role in the high-risk construction industry. Advances have been made in the understanding of construction safety climate in terms of four interrelated themes, specifically, its definition, measurement, antecedents and consequences. However, knowledge remains fragmented as the studies are scattered, and a systematic review covering these four themes is lacking. To address this research gap, this study aims to perform a systematic literature review of construction safety climate literature regarding the four themes.

Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol guidelines, 178 eligible articles were obtained. This study provided thematic analysis of the 178 papers to identify what is known and what is not yet fully known regarding the four themes of construction safety climate. This study also conducted a descriptive analysis to identify the influential scholars, keywords, theories and research methods used by the literature, and finally presented an integrative framework directing future research.

The literature has not reached a consensus on the definition and measurement of construction safety climate. While it has identified the impact of safety climate on both behavioral and accident consequences, it has paid less attention to the antecedents and their underlying mechanisms regarding safety climate. Fang D. and Lingard H. are identified as the most influential authors in this field. “Questionnaire” and “safety behavior” are the keywords most closely related to safety climate. Unfortunately, the existing evidence for the causal relationships between safety climate and its antecedents and consequences is weak, as many studies lack clear theoretical substance, use a concurrent research design and focus only on individual-level climate perceptions. Finally, to support the development of construction safety climate around the four themes, potential research directions and research methods supporting them are illustrated.

This review makes contributions by integrating existing construction studies covering its definition, measurement, antecedents and consequences. This review also makes contributions to specific themes: no review exists on the antecedents of construction safety climate, and this review fills that gap; with regard to consequences, the existing reviews focus either on safety outcomes or safety behavior, but this review included both of them and further elaborated the different theories underpinning the relationships between safety climate and them. It is hoped that this systematic review will be helpful to the research community toward developing a nomologic network and promoting knowledge integration with respect to construction safety climate.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Appointing female executives can significantly improve the wellbeing and performance of female members of staff, as well as the overall performance of firms from a non-monetary perspective.

The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

Production and transportation of precast components, as two continuous service stages of a precast plant, play an important role in meeting customer needs and controlling costs. However, there is still a lack of production and transportation scheduling methods that comprehensively consider delivery timeliness and transportation economy. This article aims to study the integrated scheduling optimization problem of in-plant flowshop production and off-plant transportation under the consideration of practical constraints of customer order delivery time window, and seek an optimal scheduling method that balances delivery timeliness and transportation economy.

In this study, an integrated scheduling optimization model of flowshop production and transportation for precast components with delivery time windows is established, which describes the relationship between production and transportation and handles transportation constraints under the premise of balancing delivery timeliness and transportation economy. Then a genetic algorithm is designed to solve this model. It realizes the integrated scheduling of production and transportation through double-layer chromosome coding. A program is designed to realize the solution process. Finally, the validity of the model is proved by the calculation of actual enterprise data.

The optimized scheduling scheme can not only meet the on-time delivery, but also improve the truck loading rate and reduce the total cost, composed of early cost in plant, delivery penalty cost and transportation cost. In the model validation, the optimal scheduling scheme uses one less truck than the traditional EDD scheme (saving 20% of the transportation cost), and the total cost can be saved by 17.22%.

This study clarifies the relationship between the production and transportation of precast components and establishes the integrated scheduling optimization model and its solution algorithm. Different from previous studies, the proposed optimization model can balance the timeliness and economy of production and transportation for precast components.

The development of prefabricated buildings has become one of the primary solutions to transform the traditional construction industry around the world. Incentive policy is one of the important driving factors for the development of prefabricated building. The policy system in the field of prefabricated buildings needs to be improved urgently. However, there is still a dearth of research on how incentive policies exert impact on the development of prefabricated buildings. This paper aims to reveal the impact mechanisms of different types of policies on the development system of prefabricated buildings.

This study categorizes prefabricated building policies, constructs a system dynamics model of prefabricated building policies and conducts scenario simulations to examine the impact and sensitivity of different types of policies on the development system of prefabricated buildings.

The results show that compulsory policies play a greater role in the early stage of prefabricated building development and need to be withdrawn at the right time. Preferential and encouraging policies play an incentive role in the middle and later stages of prefabricated building development. Encouraging policies predominate in the later stage of prefabricated building development. Based on the research results, policy recommendations for prefabricated building development are put forward respectively from the government, developers and consumers.

The research results are expected to make up for the lack of clear policies paths in existing research and provide theoretical references for the formulation and optimization of future policies.

The authors construct two time-varying political connection (PC) indexes to measure a firm's political tendencies toward ruling and opposing parties and analyze whether a firm with ruling party tendencies obtains better bank loan contracts compared to the contracts obtained by a firm with opposing party tendencies and a firm with fixed PC tendencies.

Linguistic text mining is used to construct the two time-varying PC indexes from news sources that reflect the tone and frequencies of characteristic texts to determine a firm's tendencies to favor the ruling or opposing parties.

The results show that varying PC firms connected to the ruling party receive preferential loan contracts when their political tendencies increase but varying PC firms connected to the opposition party do not. In contrast, fixed PC firms gain similar benefits only when the connection is determined in the presidential election year but not in other years. Firms supporting two parties receive minimal financial rewards in terms of loan terms.

In past studies, once a firm is identified as having a connection with a political party, it is assumed to have PC throughout the sample period (i.e. fixed PC firms). The authors lift this assumption and examine how varying PC affect bank loan contracts. The two time-varying PC indexes can identify a firm's more immediate party tendencies and more precise effects of a firm's party tendencies on bank loan contracts.

This study aims to explore a new restaurant category’s development from birth to maturity, thereby explaining the rationale for category innovation strategies.

The authors conducted a qualitative case study analysis of the New Chinese-style Fusion Restaurant category’s development from birth to maturity. Thematic analysis was conducted on data collected from semi-structured interviews and textual information.

A new restaurant category’s maturation is determined by the formation of society’s shared knowledge about the category’s crucial attributes, which is an outcome of market participants’ category-related social practices. The authors develop a novel, four-stage framework for the socialized construction of this shared knowledge: a knowledge creation (KC), knowledge diffusion (KD), knowledge integration (KI) and knowledge structuralization (KS). This knowledge evolution along this KC–KD–KI–KS sequence can holistically describe the category maturation process. This framework can help understand the rationale for a restaurant category’s maturation by analyzing the interrelationships among market participants’ social practices, knowledge-related activities and market development.

This study explains how market participants’ knowledge-related activities facilitate a new restaurant category’s maturation. This can help restaurant managers cope with increasingly homogeneous competition by applying a category-innovation strategy.

This study extends product categorization research on restaurants by articulating a product category’s maturation process from a knowledge perspective.

This study aims to theoretically hypothesize and empirically examine the impact of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on firms' innovation performance as well as the contingency conditions of this relationship.

This study collects and combines secondary longitudinal data from multiple sources to test for a direct impact of EPU on firms' innovation performance. It further examines the moderating effects of firms' operational and marketing capabilities. A series of robustness checks are performed to ensure the consistency of the findings.

In contrast to the common belief that EPU reduces the innovativeness of firms, the authors find an inverted-U relationship between EPU and innovation performance, indicating that a moderate level of EPU actually promotes innovation. Further analysis suggests that firms' operational and marketing capabilities make the inverted-U relationship steeper, further enhancing firms' innovation performance at a moderate level of EPU.

This study adds to the emerging literature that investigates the operational implications of EPU, which enhances our understanding of the potential bright side of EPU and broadens the scope of operational risk management.