Search results

This research aims to examine the US–China policy shift from Obama to Biden emphasizing the centrality of Taiwan question in the geostrategic competition with Beijing and its prospect if the US strategy remains unchanged.

A conceptual framework is outlined, illustrating how the US grand strategy is driven by the ideological foundation of Exceptionalism. The paper highlights the associated US policy changes that evolved from Obama to Trump and then Biden to advance Washington's strategic interests in its rivalry with China over Taiwan.

Biden's policy led to an escalating geopolitical competition with Beijing over Taiwan to maintain US supremacy. The Biden administration is more stringent than the previous administrations on the Taiwan question and there is the conviction that the USA must not back down on Taiwan because the alternative will be a retraction of US world primacy to Beijing. With Washington's persistent hegemonic strategy, the US–China confrontation over Taiwan seems inevitable.

The research highlights how the Biden administration managed a perpetuated Ukraine crisis and forged unprecedented high-level ties with Taiwan, indicating the administration's determination to exacerbate contentions with Beijing over Taiwan rather than de-escalate.

The authors examine how performance measurement systems (PMSs) and academic agency influence the meaning of research quality in practice. The worries are that the notion of research quality is becoming too simplistically and narrowly determined by research quality's measurable proxies and that academics, especially manager-academics, do not sufficiently realise this risk. Whilst prior literature has covered the effects of performance measurement in the university sector broadly and how PMSs are mobilised locally, there is only little understanding of whether and how PMSs affect the meaning of research quality in practice.

The study is designed as a comparative case study of two university faculties in Finland. The role of conceptual analysis plays a notable role in the study, too.

The authors find that manager-academics of the two examined faculties have rather similar conceptual understandings of research quality. However, there were differences in the degree of slippage between the “espoused-meaning” of research quality and “meaning-in-practice” of research quality. The authors traced these differences to how the local PMS and manager-academics’ agency relate to one another within the context of increasing global and national performance pressures. The authors developed a tentative framework for the various “styles of agency”. This suggests how the relationship between the local PMS and manager-academics’ exerted agency shapes the “degrees of freedom” of the meaning of research quality in practice.

Given that research quality lies at the heart of academic work, the authors' paper indicates that exploring the three matters – performance measurement, the agency of manager-academics and the meaning of research quality in practice – in combination is crucial for the sustainability of the academe. The authors contribute to the literature by detailing the way in which local PMS and manager-academics' agency have material impacts on what research quality means in practice. The authors conclude by highlighting the pressing need for manager-academics to exercise the agency in efforts to safeguard a broad and pluralistic understanding of research quality in practice.

The study aims to reveal the effects of transformational leadership on nonfamily employee international intrapreneurship with the mediating role of psychological empowerment.

The study sample consists of 379 employees at 132 family export and import firms in Ho Chi Minh City of Vietnam. The data is analyzed by a partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).

The paper reveals that transformational leadership had a positive and significant influence on nonfamily employee international intrapreneurship. The effect of transformational leadership on international intrapreneurship is strongly mediated by psychological empowerment.

Family firms would have to form the architecture and mechanisms for supporting the dedication of nonfamily international intrapreneurship actions with transformational leadership and psychological empowerment.

The paper grants the driving mechanism of the transformational leadership on nonfamily employee international intrapreneurship through the mediating role of employee psychological empowerment in the context of family businesses in an emerging market.

The purpose of this study is to examine the implementation of human resource management (HRM) practices that facilitate innovation in the public sector in a developing country.

Qualitative method was engaged whereby a semi-structured interview was conducted to get the responses of two groups of employees which are top management and executive in two types of public organizations which are awarded and non-awarded. The collected data was later analyzed thematically.

The results show that there are differences and similarities among the public agencies in terms of their implementation of HRM practices that facilitate innovation. Apparently, the awarded public agencies do follow HRM practices that really facilitate innovation such as local training, provide more types of rewards to their employees and set a higher minimum level of innovation in their performance evaluation.

This research confines only 10 public agencies in Malaysia. Future studies might want to include a larger sample size to make the findings more extensive. It also would be interesting to know different approaches in HRM implemented in the private organizations as well as to examine their influences on performance and other organizational factors.

Good and fair HRM practices such as training, reward and performance appraisal practices that focus on innovation facilitate and produce more innovative employees and organization innovation. Thus, public managers should implement them to a higher extent.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that aims to engage the qualitative method in understanding how HRM practices can facilitate innovation in a developing country.

The purpose of this article was to provide an outline of the citation practices of “Evolving to a new dominant logic for marketing” by Vargo and Lusch (2004) to identify and discuss the most prominent research topics in which citations were used and to suggest future research based on the results of the analysis.

The authors used a comprehensive framework of citation practices based on iterations of previous literature to analyze the relevant literature, which they identified by accessing, systematically and rigorously, every available contribution matching a set of criteria. The authors then categorized these contributions and highlighted the main topics of research interest in each category.

The findings identify some of the factors in the continuous development of SDL, the way this new marketing logic permeated the scientific debate, the infusion of Vargo and Lusch (2004) into several contributions framed in the new logic or justified through it, and a general perception of a default reference. Additionally, the findings highlight the main topics of research interest in each category.

The analysis enabled the detection of the original paper's influence through advances in service studies, pollination into other fields of research and continuous scientific debate. The authors have highlighted several avenues for research and proposed future research directions.

This research analyzed the effects of the spread of the SDL cornerstone article and emphasized the advantage of using an in-depth approach to the analysis of studies through a framework applied to more than 4,600 studies.

Statistics show that the construction sector has the second-highest number of accident cases in Malaysia. A total of 100, 000 construction workers suffer from work-related bad health each year. Scaffolding accidents are the second cause of accidents on construction sites. Therefore, this present research provided answers to the following questions: (1) what are the causes of scaffolding accidents and (2) what are the possible measures to reduce scaffolding accidents?

The research developed a questionnaire instrument that included 24 causes of scaffolding accidents and 21 remedial actions. The research was based on a cross-sectional survey questionnaire administered to 129 members of construction organizations.

Data revealed that scaffolding-related cases caused a total of 70% of the deaths/injuries on sites. Furthermore, scaffolding accidents were mainly caused by a lack of guard rails on scaffoldings, poor inspections, improper assembly, a poor safety culture, poor attitudes towards safety, poor footing of scaffoldings and unsecured planking. To reduce scaffolding accidents, there must be a lifeline on scaffolding, proper guardrails and proper assembling of scaffoldings, and preventing access to incomplete or defective scaffoldings. The 24 causes are structured into six factors through factor analysis and the 21 remedial actions into six factors.

This research serves as the first attempt to conduct broad research on the causes and remedial actions concerning scaffolding accidents on construction sites in Malaysia. Theoretically, the research has provided fresh insights into the impact of scaffolding accidents.

This study uses a critically acclaimed digital game as an instructional tool to explore the role of emotional design elements on psychological flow and perceived learning.

The authors employ transportation theory to generate a set of antecedents of psychological flow and the theory of flow to connect the gaming experience to positive learning outcomes. The authors investigate the subjective learning experience of players with the use of a psychometric survey, and the authors employ structural equation modelling (SEM) to unearth the direct as well as the indirect effects amongst narrative, aesthetics, flow and learning outcomes.

The findings of this study demonstrate that narrative and aesthetics in serious games positively influence the perceived learning by facilitating a state of psychological flow.

This study contributes to better understanding and theorizing the role of narrative and aesthetics on learning outcomes in the context of serious games.

The findings of this study bear valuable implications for the design of serious games as they highlight the importance of elements often disregarded as not directly related to the learning process and are typically absent from the design of serious games.

Prior studies have identified aesthetics and narratives as design elements that contribute to the perceived enjoyment of a game; this study empirically investigates the role of narratives and aesthetics in enhancing perceived learning through psychological flow.