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The purpose of this paper is to investigate political influential spreaders in Twitter at the juncture before and after the Malaysian General Election in 2013 (MGE2013) for the purpose of understanding if the political sphere within Twitter reflects the intentions, popularity and influence of political figures in the year in which Malaysia has its first “social media election.”

A Big Data approach was used for acquiring a series of longitudinal data sets during the election period. The work differs from existing methods focusing on the general statistics of the number of followers, supporters, sentiment analysis, etc. A retweeting network has been extracted from tweets and retweets and has been mapped to a novel information flow and propagation network we developed. The authors conducted quantitative studies using k-shell decomposition, which enables the construction of a quantitative Twitter political propagation sphere where members posited at the core areas are more influential than those in the outer circles and periphery.

The authors conducted a comparative study of the influential members of Twitter political propagation sphere on the election day and the day after. The authors found that representatives of political parties which are located at the center of the propagation network are winners of the presidential election. This may indicate that influential power within Twitter is positively related to the final election results, at least in MGE2013. Furthermore, a number of non-politicians located at the center of the propagation network also significantly influenced the election.

This research is based on a large electoral campaign in a specific election period, and within a predefined nation. While the result is significant and meaningful, more case studies are needed for generalized application for identifying potential winning candidates in future social-media fueled political elections.

The authors presented a simple yet effective model for identifying influential spreaders in the Twitter political sphere. The application of the authors’ approach yielded the conclusion that online “coreness” score has significant influence to the final offline electoral results. This presents great opportunities for applying the novel methodology in the upcoming Malaysian General Election in 2018. The discovery presented here can be used for understanding how different players of political parties engage themselves in the election game in Twitter. The approach can also be adopted as a factor of influence for offline electoral activities. The conception of a quantitative approach in electoral results greatly influenced by social media means that comparative studies could be made in future elections.

Existing works related to general elections of various nations have either bypassed or ignored the subtle links between online and offline influential propagations. The modeling of influence from social media using a longitudinal and multilayered approach is also rarely studied. This simple yet effective method provides a new perspective of practice for understanding how different players behave and mutually shape each other over time in the election game.

Researcher agreed that job performance has a positive effect on productivity as well as an organisation’s efficiency. Thus, this study aims to investigate the impact of mindfulness skill, inclusive leadership (IL), employee work engagement and self-compassion on the overall job performance of secondary school teachers in Hong Kong. It then evaluates the mediating effect of employee work engagement between the relationships of mindfulness skill, IL and job performance, as well as the moderate effect of self-compassion between the relationships of mindfulness skill, IL and employee work engagement.

The sample comprised 263 teachers working from three secondary schools in Sha Tin, Hong Kong. The data was then analysed using Smart PLS version 4.0.9.

The results showed significant positive relationships between mindfulness skill and IL towards employee work engagement and between employee work engagement and job performance; meanwhile, there emerged a significant effect on the relationship between mindfulness skill and IL towards job performance. Furthermore, this research has confirmed that self-compassion did not moderate the relationship between mindfulness skill, IL and employee work engagement, but employee work engagement plays a mediating effect on the relationship between mindfulness skill, IL and job performance.

This research has helped to fill the literature gap by examining the mediating roles of employee work engagement and mediator role of self-compassion in the integrated relationship of multi-factor and job performance. Examining the mediating role of employee work engagement has helped to enhance the understanding of the underlying principle of the indirect influence of mindfulness skill, IL and job performance. The result of this research shows that self-compassion plays a vital role in influencing the employees’ work engagement. Hence, it is important that companies design human resource management policy that enables self-compassion to be used as a consideration psychological-related strategy when structing organisation or teams. It is also crucial for top management and policymakers to define and communicate the organisation’s operating principle, value and goals.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a semantics representation framework for narrative images, conforming to the image-interpretation process.

This paper explores the essential features of semantics evolution in the process of narrative images interpretation. It proposes a novel semantics representation framework, ESImage (evolution semantics of image) for narrative images. ESImage adopts a hierarchical architecture to progressively organize the semantic information in images, enabling the evolutionary interpretation under the support of a graph-based semantics data model. Also, the study shows the feasibility of this framework by addressing the issues of typical semantics representation with the scenario of the Dunhuang fresco.

The process of image interpretation mainly concerns three issues: bottom-up description, the multi-faceted semantics representation and the top-down semantics complementation. ESImage can provide a comprehensive solution for narrative image semantics representation by addressing the major issues based on the semantics evolution mechanisms of the graph-based semantics data model.

ESImage needs to be combined with machine learning to meet the requirements of automatic annotation and semantics interpretation of large-scale image resources.

This paper sorts out the characteristics of the gradual interpretation of narrative images and has discussed the major issues in its semantics representation. Also, it proposes the semantic framework ESImage which deploys a flexible and sound mechanism to represent the semantic information of narrative images.

This paper aims to examine the tensions between global and local corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives developed by multinationals managing subsidiaries in different emergent countries. Multinationals carry out a wide array of political activities (Boddewyn and Brewer, 1994; Hillman and Hitt, 1999; Rehbein and Schuler, 1995) supporting their economic objectives, even though the political landscape and the institutional environment may vary significantly in the different countries in which they are located (Luo, 2006). This can raise issues related to the management of cross-border political imperatives as well as the coordination of political activities among multinational companies and their subsidiaries.

Based on a documentary research, this paper analyses the key challenges facing the non-market and CSR strategies of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) a world leading, research-based pharmaceutical and health-care company.

The paper further looks at the way in which GSK deploys its global non-market strategies and manages their alignment with local CSR initiatives in emerging markets, particularly in China.

Further research is required to address the question of international CSR mediation and moderation of this imbalance between pressures for global consistency and local responsiveness. More specifically, in-depth case studies designed to target local managers, as well as their counterparts from the MNE headquarters, should allow us to more effectively analyse and capture the perceived biases with regard to the way the CSR agenda is set at the central level, in light of its global strategy and to the needs and demands of their local host countries’ stakeholders.

This exploratory research based on secondary data allows an interesting base for analysis of the synergies between CSR, non-market strategies and international strategic management which provide a promising base for continuing research.