Search results

The purpose of this research is to investigate the causal mechanisms that explain the relationship between the long-term buyer–supplier relationship and buyer performance. Building on the growing body of research on social capital in supply chain management (SCM), the authors examine how a buyer achieves superior performance in forming the enduring partnership with a supplier through two different forms of supplier embeddedness: buyer–supplier dyadic embeddedness and supplier external embeddedness.

The bootstrapping method is utilized in data analysis to examine the mediating effects of the two different forms of supplier embeddedness simultaneously on the linkage between the duration of buyer–supplier relationships and buyer performance outcomes.

The authors find that the two forms of supplier embeddedness serve as distinct conduits for the buyer to translate the long-term buyer–supplier relationship into performance effectiveness. Notably, dyadic embeddedness only mediates the linkage between the duration of buyer–supplier relationships and buyer economic performance, while supplier external embeddedness solely mediates the linkage between the duration of buyer–supplier relationships and buyer innovation performance.

This study empirically demonstrates that different forms of supplier embeddedness may benefit a buyer differentially when directed at distinct performance goals. If a buyer can leverage both buyer–supplier dyadic embeddedness and supplier external embeddedness, the buyer will overcome value creation limitations of social capital from a single source, obtaining more comprehensive performance benefits sought by developing long-term buyer–supplier relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to apply what can be learned from the emergence of nature tourism to understand some current and future trends of tourism.

This study adopted the evolutionary paradigm for investigation.

The emergence of nature tourism in early medieval China can be attributed to four major factors, including transformation of value orientations, seeking longevity, interest in suburbs and population migration.

Historical studies help understand the current and future trends. When the contributing factors for nature tourism are linked to the contemporary world, it can be found that these factors are still playing a part in shaping tourism trends or patterns in their original or alternative forms. These trends or patterns are worthy of scholarly investigations.

This paper offers a comprehensive understanding of the origins of nature tourism.

The purpose of this paper is to explore China’s online wine market segmentation on the basis of the wine-related lifestyle (WRL). Moreover, this study can provide further understanding and reference about China’s wine market segmentation research, which is limited at present. This work can be helpful for those who want to do further research in the Chinese wine market. It is good for wine importers wanting to import wine to China to understand the Chinese wine consumers.

Survey data were obtained from a sample of 3,369 participants through cooperation between the College of Enology and the Yesmywine.com website. Questionnaire items included gender, age, area distribution, unit price, bottles consumed, drinking frequency, drinking time, wine-related knowledge, etc. Combined with the influence factors of the WRL, a structural equation model was developed. The data analysis, particularly employing principal component analysis, enabled the identification of five market segments.

Five distinct segments were identified within the wine market and designated as follows: wine official consumption type enthusiastic fancier; enjoyment consumption; fashionable consumption; and new, young wine drinkers.

The research data were derived from Yesmywine, one of the largest online wine sale platforms. However, the impact of yesmywine is much smaller compared with Tmall and Taobao and Jingdong. In this paper, we can see that WRL is increasingly becoming a part of Chinese people’s daily lives, especially for the enthusiastic and fancier wine consumers, which is the official type of wine consumer. Next, an analysis of time series under the data of the near future years should be conducted to find the online wine segmentation market variation trend. Moreover, it is important to conduct cross-culture comparison between the Chinese and Australians. Brand positioning can be improved by better understanding China’s online wine market segmentation.

WRL segmentation is valuable for the wine importers and producers in west France, Italian, Germany and so on, as they want to develop China’s wine market and understand the mindset of Chinese wine consumers. The wine importers in China should focus more on consumers that enjoy wine along with newer and younger wine drinkers.

This paper analyzes a large sample (3,369) and therefore is useful for understanding online wine market segmentation and wine consumption behavior in China owing to China’s limited wine market segmentation literature. This paper is the first to use WRL tool to segment China’s online wine market. Moreover, the research data have reference value for those who want to learn more about China’s online wine market, as yesmywine is one of the largest online wine-sale platforms. It also gives some managerial implications for wineries and wine marketers that will be helpful to wine companies in understanding the emerging Chinese wine market and in enacting wine marketing strategies more effectively.

Vision, audition, olfactory, tactile and taste are five important senses that human uses to interact with the real world. As facing more and more complex environments, a sensing system is essential for intelligent robots with various types of sensors. To mimic human-like abilities, sensors similar to human perception capabilities are indispensable. However, most research only concentrated on analyzing literature on single-modal sensors and their robotics application.

This study presents a systematic review of five bioinspired senses, especially considering a brief introduction of multimodal sensing applications and predicting current trends and future directions of this field, which may have continuous enlightenments.

This review shows that bioinspired sensors can enable robots to better understand the environment, and multiple sensor combinations can support the robot’s ability to behave intelligently.

The review starts with a brief survey of the biological sensing mechanisms of the five senses, which are followed by their bioinspired electronic counterparts. Their applications in the robots are then reviewed as another emphasis, covering the main application scopes of localization and navigation, objection identification, dexterous manipulation, compliant interaction and so on. Finally, the trends, difficulties and challenges of this research were discussed to help guide future research on intelligent robot sensors.

This paper aims to develop an original framework of innovation and to explore the complexity of association between individual and collective (team-based) entrepreneurship, and their simultaneous impacts on innovation in context of small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

An integral theoretical framework is developed to encourage innovation and the hypothetical relations are tested with the help of structural equation modeling (SEM) through AMOS. Data were gathered through survey technique and the questioners were distributed through email among 700 entrepreneurs from SMEs operating in five major industrial cities of Punjab province Pakistan.

The results of SEM analyses confirm that both the individual entrepreneur and the collective efforts of all the business members contribute to innovation in SMEs. Entrepreneur’s personality traits have a direct positive impact on innovation while the centralized decision-making by entrepreneur is not associated with innovation. Centralized decision-making is found to be negatively associated with communication and have insignificant positive association with collaboration. Factors associated with the team-based entrepreneurship like communication and collaboration among members of the SME’s contribute to the entrepreneurial orientation and collective entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurial orientation and collective entrepreneurship have direct positive impact on innovation in SMEs.

It is imperative for SMEs to encourage decentralized organizational culture and participative leadership to bring innovation into their products and processes and further to improve their competitive advantage.

To the best of author knowledge, present study is a first attempt that explores the complex association between individual and team-based entrepreneurship and further, empirically investigate the simultaneous impacts of these variables on innovation in context of SMEs.

This study aims to present the Chinese entrepreneurial environment and explore Chinese tertiary students’ online-startup motivation on live streaming platforms. Based on the COM-B behaviour changing theory, this paper discovers various influencing factors from environmental opportunity and personal capability aspects. It analyses their effects under the cooperative system established among official departments, industries and universities. Meanwhile, considering social and cultural control, it also refers to the uncertainty-avoidance dimension from the Hofstede cultural theory and re-evaluates its influence on Chinese tertiary students’ online-startup motivation.

The authors analyse 474 responses from online questionnaires through partial least squares path modelling and variance-based structural equation modelling. The paper claims that environmental opportunity and personal capability factors positively affect students’ online-startup motivation, but uncertainty-avoidance thinking plays a negative role. The study also measures the importance-performance map analysis to explore additional findings and discuss managerial implications.

Both platform support and official department support positively impact Chinese tertiary students’ online-startup motivation and entrepreneurial skills learned from universities are beneficial for them to build online-startup confidence. Meanwhile, influenced by the cooperative system implemented among official departments, industries and universities, official department support positively affects platform support and entrepreneurial skills. Conversely, influenced by Chinese traditional Confucian culture, uncertainty-avoidance thinking negatively affects tertiary students’ online-startup motivation.

This paper demonstrates the analysis of Chinese tertiary students’ online-startup motivation drawing on the COM-B behaviour changing and Hofstede cultural theories. Specifically, this study divides influencing factors into three specific aspects as follows: environmental opportunity, personal capability and social and cultural control. Unlike existing research applying traditional research models, the combination of the COM-B behaviour changing theory and the Hofstede cultural theory could be conducive to making the research model reflect influencing factors and present their different relationships.

The study aims to understand how cultural route heritage is conceptualized and managed in China by systematically reviewing the research literature on Chinese cultural route heritage (CRH). The study intends to inspire further discussion on the theoretical and practical development of cultural routes since the development is still at a liminal stage in China.

A total of 253 research articles related to Chinese cultural rote heritage from major Chinese and English research databases China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus have been comprehensively identified and reviewed for the purpose of the study.

Four major themes of research on Chinese CRH have been identified: conceptual evaluation, list of the routes and characteristics of the routes, conservation and utilization. The results revealed that China has very rich resources in CRH, many of which were formed a long time ago, which exist across vast geographic regions and have assumed multiple functions and undergone dynamic reciprocal exchanges among diverse cultures and ethnicities.

The paper summarizes some major obstacles faced by CRH in China and proposes a strategic model to address the need for a more sustainable development of CRH in the Chinese context.

The paper offers a comprehensive overview of CRH in China and discusses practical issues in management and development of heritage great in size, number and complexity.