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This paper aims to address the immediate effects of the COVID-19 crisis in the Portuguese tourism and hospitality industry by examining whether some specific characteristics make people more vulnerable or more immune to unemployment.

Using an extensive micro-level data set of personal and job-related attributes containing all unemployed individuals in the Portuguese tourism and hospitality industry, a logit model with 56,142 observations is estimated to assess how each characteristic contributed to the unemployment odds during the COVID-19 crisis (until the end-July 2020), relatively to the pre-COVID period.

The most vulnerable workers to COVID-19 unemployment seem to be older, less educated, less qualified, women and residents in regions with a higher concentration of people and tourism activity. Moreover, the COVID-19 crisis is generating a new type of unemployment by also affecting those who were never unemployed before, with more stable jobs and more motivated at work, while reducing voluntary disruptions.

Public effort should be made not only to increase workforce education but especially to reinforce job-specific skills. The COVID-19 crisis has broken traditional protective measures against unemployment and separated workers from their desired occupations, which justifies new and exceptional job preservation measures. Policy recommendations are given aiming at strengthening worker resilience and industry competitiveness in the most affected sub-sectors and regions.

This study extends the current understanding of worker vulnerability to economic downturns. Herein, this paper used a three-level approach (combining socio-demographic, work-related and regional factors), capturing the immediate effects of the COVID-19 crisis and focussing on the tourism and hospitality industry (the hardest-hit sector worldwide).

Focuses on business investments by Singaporean Chinese in Mainland China vis‐à‐vis the impact of the knowledge of the Chinese language, culture etc. on business success. The literature has shown four critical factors namely culture, guanxi, negotiation and communication as important facilitators for business investments in China. Chinese language, however, further moderates their influence on business investments. To explore the association between the Chinese language and the four critical factors, a sample t‐test was conducted. Additionally, the profile of Singaporean business investors in Mainland China was surveyed. The research provices insights for Singaporean and global business investors who are looking at Mainland China as a potential business opportunity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relations of job insecurity with pay and incentive satisfaction and the role of overall justice in these relationships.

The authors surveyed employees of an industrial equipment sales firm located in the Southeastern USA. Surveys were completed by 151 employees using instruments assessing job insecurity, overall justice, pay satisfaction, and incentive satisfaction.

The study results indicated job insecurity is negatively related to both pay and incentive satisfaction. Further, the study found that overall justice mediated the job insecurity to pay satisfaction relationship, but not the job insecurity to incentive satisfaction relationship.

Because overall justice only explained the job insecurity-pay satisfaction relationship, future research should examine other potential mediators to better understand these disparate effects when compared with incentive satisfaction. Future research should also examine the model with a larger sample using a time-lagged design to further mitigate the limitations of the study.

The results of this study suggest that employees who contain a strong fear of job loss tend to experience reduced pay and incentive satisfaction levels. Managers should do what they can to limit the impact of job insecurity on these attitudes and provide additional training to employees in coping strategies so that they might better deal with the job insecurity stressor.

Integrating the literatures on stress appraisal and organizational justice, the empirical model provides understanding of how job stressors and perceptions of organizational justice influence pay and incentive satisfaction.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of hotel safety leadership on employee safety behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the mediation role of belief restoration and the moderation role of perceived risk between safety leadership and behavior were also investigated.

The COVID-19 outbreak served as the background for a questionnaire survey of 23 hotels in China with 1,594 valid responses being received. The statistical analysis techniques used were exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, correlation analysis, structural equation modeling and hierarchical regression.

The results showed that: hotel safety leadership positively affected employee safety behavior (compliance, participation and adaptation); belief restoration partially mediated the influence of safety leadership on safety behavior; and perceived risk negatively moderated the direct effect and the mediation effect of “safety leadership – belief restoration – safety behavior.”

The main limitation was that the questionnaires were collected with the same measurement system within a certain period of time (cross-sectional design). Then, future research should test and expand this conceptual model in different crises, business fields, theoretical orientation and cultural backgrounds.

Hotels should develop management strategies based on safety leadership and motivate and promote employee safety behavior from the four aspects of safety coaching, care, motivation and control.

This investigation expanded the research on the effectiveness of safety leadership and especially with respect to safety in the hospitality industry during a major global crisis. Also, the research conceptual model and variables contained therein are original contributions to the hospitality research literature.

Guided by resource-based theory, this investigation examines the extent to which knowledge sharing as part of interfirm collaboration serves as a performance-enhancing strategy; that is, in the context of assisting ethnic minority-owned urban restaurants to survive during a major market disruption. Specifically, the study features owner-managers' perceptions concerning the evolving environmental circumstances associated with the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

Data collection took place among owner-managers of urban restaurants in a Canadian city during the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2020. This featured semi-structured interviews with restaurants' owner-managers originating from various ethnic origins together with secondary data where possible. Data analysis followed an adapted Gioia approach.

Examples of interfirm collaboration include restaurants' owner-managers leveraging social capital and sharing knowledge about the effects of legislation and health guidelines on operating procedures, together with good and bad practices where firms have pivoted their business models via take-outs, patio dining and in-room dining. Irrespective of the strength of network ties (within and across ethnic communities), owner-managers were motivated to share information to facilitate their survival. Nevertheless, this study raises questions over the extent that certain decision-makers exhibit strategic flexibility responding to environmental conditions together with their respective ability to engage/retain customers plus service-oriented employees. In addition, a question is whether some owner-managers will continue to collaborate with their competitors after COVID-19 ends, and if so, with whom and the magnitude of activities. In particular, “trust” via psychological contracts and “complementary strategies” among partners across coethnic and different ethnic origins are key considerations.

A body of knowledge exists addressing the notions of both interfirm collaboration and market disruptions in the broader cross-disciplinary literature. However, the interfirm collaborative practices of small firms with ethnic minority ownership that are otherwise rivals remain under-researched. More specifically, interfirm collaboration as a survival strategy for owner-managers during the market disruption arising from a crisis situation features as an original contribution.

Many studies on witch killings in Africa suggest that “witchcraft is the dark side of kinship.” But in Chinese history, where patriarchal clan system has been emphasized as the foundation of the society, there have been few occurrences of witch-hunting except a large-scale one in the Cultural Revolution in 1966. The purpose of this paper is to explain the above two paradoxes.

Theoretical analysis based on preference falsification problem with regard to the effect of social structure on witch-hunting is carried out.

There is a “bright side of kinship” due to two factors: first, it would be more difficult to pick out a person as qualitatively different in Chinese culture; second, the hierarchical trust structure embedded in the Chinese culture can help mitigate the preference falsification problem, which acts as the leverage for witch-hunting. In this sense, an important factor for the Cultural Revolution is the decline of traditional social institutions and social values after 1949.

This paper is the first to advance the two paradoxes and offer an explanation from the perspective of social structure.

This paper aims to present a new design for removable partial dentures (RPDs) for partially edentulous patients to improve the efficiency and quality of RPD manufacturing. Additive and subtractive manufacturing technologies and zirconium silicate micro-ceramic bonding in the aesthetic zone are used herein.

A case was presented. First, RPD digital definitive casts were acquired, and then digital frameworks with crown retainers and digital crowns were obtained by computer-aided design (CAD). The titanium alloy frameworks and resin crowns were fabricated by three-dimensional (3D) printing and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) processes, respectively. The crowns adhered to the crown retainers. Ceramage bonding was used to reform the gingival anatomy in the aesthetic zone during the fabrication of the RPDs. The finished RPDs were assessed by a clinician and delivered to the patient.

The RPDs were conventionally assessed by a clinician, were deemed to be accurate and satisfied both the patient and clinician.

This novel method provides a way to fabricate RPDs with a combination of additive and subtractive manufacturing technologies. The design of the framework was different from that of a conventional framework because it contained the crown retainers, and the traditional base retainer no longer existed. Ceramage bonding was used to replicate the gingival anatomy in the aesthetic zone. The new RPDs provided accuracy and were less time-consuming to produce than those produced with the traditional method. The new method enables the digital manufacturing of nearly the entire RPDs.

The purpose of study is to develop methods for damage prevention and production safety.

In this study, water aquifers in various districts of the Merlin Temple coal-mining area number 3-1 were examined using a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation. Using FLAC-3D software, a three-dimensional numerical model based on the geological conditions of the first mining area was built to produce a numerical simulation of the fissure-zone and caving development in the area.

The simulation results, together with the traditional empirical formula, were used to produce a contour map of the distribution of these characteristics. This enabled areas to be classified according to various safety factors.

On the basis of the water richness in the area, coal-roof aquifers and the safety factors of different districts, as well as comprehensive coal-roof water-flow conditions and their associated dangers could be better understood.

In the 21^st Century, a region 's growth and prosperity will depend upon its intermodal transportation infrastructure and its ability to efficiently move goods, materials, and people within the system whether it be from origin to destination; from supplier to customer through the various levels of the supply-chain; or from point to point within the system. Planning for the future focuses on improving a region 's intermodal transportation system efficiencies and infrastructure, its connection to other economies, and on the development of logistics institutions and facilities.

With China 's rapidly developing economy and society, record numbers of new modern facilities such as airports, ports, highways, logistics parks and warehouses are being built. Along with this, companies have made extensive investments in information technologies and software to support the tremendous growth that has taken place in the logistics industry. The development and improvement of China's historic inland water transport system is essential to their continued future growth and prosperity. In Korea, past and present National Governments have emphasized the importance of developing a North East Asian Logistics and Business Hub in their region and have worked on strategies, which include water transport, as part of an important national agenda to that end.

This article looks at how trade flows in the Yangtze and Yellow Sea Regions and between China and South Korea might be enhanced by application of improved shipping methods in marine commerce that will promote economic growth in the region. The application of logistics practices and use of barges is explored for the movement of containers on inland and coastal waterways as well as in short sea shipping which could greatly facilitate the region 's situation with respect to future economic growth.

Multiple input multiple-output (MIMO) has emerged as one among the many noteworthy technologies in recent wireless applications because of its powerful ability to improve bandwidth efficiency and performance, i.e. through developing its unique spatial multiplexing capability and spatial diversity gain. For carrying out an enhanced communication in next-generation networks, the MIMO and orthogonal frequency division multiple systems were combined that facilitate the spatial multiplexing on resource blocks (RBs) based on time-frequency. This paper aims to propose a novel approach for maximizing the throughput of cell-edge users and cell-center users.

In this work, the specified multi-objective function is defined as the single objective function, which is solved by the introduction of a new improved algorithm as well. This optimization problem can be resolved by the fine-tuning of certain parameters such as assigned power for RB, cell-center user, cell-edge user and RB allocation. The fine-tuning of parameters is attained by a new improved Lion algorithm (LA), termed as Lion with new cub generation (LA-NCG) model. Finally, the betterment of the presented approach is validated over the existing models in terms of signal to interference plus noise ratio, throughput and so on.

On examining the outputs, the adopted LA-NCG model for 4BS was 66.67%, 66.67% and 20% superior to existing joint processing coordinated multiple point-based dual decomposition method (JC-DDM), fractional programming (FP) and LA models. In addition, the throughput of conventional JC-DDM, FP and LA models lie at a range of 10, 45 and 35, respectively, at the 100th iteration. However, the presented LA-NCG scheme accomplishes a higher throughput of 58. Similarly, the throughput of the adopted scheme observed for 8BS was 59.68%, 44.19% and 9.68% superior to existing JC-DDM, FP and LA models. Thus, the enhancement of the adopted LA-NCG model has been validated effectively from the attained outcomes.

This paper adopts the latest optimization algorithm called LA-NCG to establish a novel approach for maximizing the throughput of cell-edge users and cell-center users. This is the first that work uses LA-NCG-based optimization that assists in fine-tuning certain parameters such as assigned power for RB, cell-center user, cell-edge user and RB allocation.