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This chapter examines China’s corporate governance and accounting environment that shapes the adoption of internationally acceptable principles and standards. Specifically, it examines international influences, including supranational organizations; foreign investors and international accounting firms; domestic institutional influences, including the political system, economic system, legal system, and cultural system; and accounting infrastructure. China’s convergence is driven by desired efficiency of the corporate sector and legitimacy of participating in the global market. Influenced heavily by international forces in the context of globalization, corporate governance and accounting practices are increasingly becoming in line with internationally acceptable standards and codes. While convergence assists China in obtaining legitimacy, improving efficiency is likely to be adversely affected given that corporate governance and accounting in China operate in an environment that differs considerably from those of Anglo-American countries. An examination of the corporate governance and accounting environment in China suggests heavy government involvement within underdeveloped institutions. While the Chinese government has made impressive progress in developing the corporate governance and accounting environment for the market economy, China’s unique institutional setting is likely to affect how the imported concepts are interpreted and implemented.

Women in many countries are breaking through the gender barrier and are working in positions where they have a major impact on the buying and selling activities in business-to-business relationships. A number of studies have investigated the role gender plays in driving perceptions of sales representatives in the USA, however, little research has been undertaken on this important topic in China, one of the largest and most influential countries. Consequently, the purpose of this study is to examine whether the gender of both the buyer and seller, affects perceptions of expertise, trust and loyalty in business relationships.

A survey instrument was developed, tested and used on individuals with purchasing responsibility in China. Confirmatory factor analysis was used in the pre-test and the final study data to develop and refine measurement instruments, assessing construct validity, identifying method effects and evaluating factor variance across groups. Independent t-tests were used to compare male and female buyers on their evaluation of sales reps.

The results indicate that the gender of the sales person does not seem to be a consideration for male buyers in evaluating reps in any of the variables tested. However, female buyers consistently give less favorable evaluations to female sales people than male sales representatives. The possible implications of these findings are discussed.

First, this research uses a quantitative methodology in both the collection and analysis of the data. Thus, future studies may want to use a qualitative data set to gain a more in-depth understanding of the business-to-business relationships between men and women in the workplace. Also, as the study was concentrated on a relatively small number of business professionals from only one area in China, subsequently researchers should consider increasing the geographic domain where respondents are sampled, to help improve the generalizability of the results.

The gender bias by female buyers found in this study has several important implications for businesses in China. Specifically, the suggests that female buyers may carry with them a “collective negative bias” against other women, in this case, female sales reps. The solution to this problem is not to avoid assigning female sales reps to female buyers, rather, it is to change the negative collective social-esteem identity preconceptions. Organizations can do this through training by making women aware of their own predisposition to unfairly evaluate women that they interact with in the workplace.

It has been argued that gender plays a small role in perceptions of sales representatives in buyer-seller relationships. While this seems to be true in the USA, it has not (until now) been empirically tested in China. Somewhat surprisingly, the gender differences we did uncover are not from male buyers in their assessments, but from female buyers in their evaluation of women sales representatives. This result provides some interesting insight into Chinese business relationships and how some women in positions of power are more critical of other women within their sphere of influence.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the current state of corporate entrepreneurship (CE) of emerging market firms (EMFs) and provide direction for future research on the topic.

The authors specifically review the recent literature between the years 2000 and 2019 on CE with the keywords “corporate entrepreneurship,” “emerging economies” and “emerging countries” published in the Australian Business Deans Council list journals. The authors review the existing literature about CE in emerging markets, summarize current achievements and present an agenda for future research.

Based on the review, the authors categorized the macro and micro contexts of CE and summarized the current articles on CE in emerging markets within each macro and micro context. The authors conclude that despite the abundance of research on CE that investigates the three prongs of CE in terms of innovation, strategic renewal and new venturing in developed market contexts, there is a scarcity of literature that focuses on CE in emerging markets from a holistic perspective.

While there is an abundance of literature review on CE in general in terms of the drivers of the construct, the contexts contributing to it and the outcomes, the reviews are lacking about CE specifically within the context of emerging markets. Emerging markets vary from developed markets institutionally, economically, culturally, socially and technologically. However, the questions of how these differences impact the CE activities, as it relates to innovation, venturing and strategic renewal in EMFs, and how these differences provide incentives or hinder the activities that contribute to CE remain mostly unanswered. This paper reviewed the research on CE and emerging market contexts from 2000 to present. It targets to provide a better understanding of the current achievement on this topic and what to be done in the future.

The purpose of this study is to present a novel hybrid closed-loop control method together with its performance validation for the dexterous prosthetic hand.

The hybrid closed-loop control is composed of a high-level closed-loop control with the user in the closed loop and a low-level closed-loop control for the direct robot motion control. The authors construct the high-level control loop by using electromyography (EMG)-based human motion intent decoding and electrical stimulation (ES)-based sensory feedback. The human motion intent is decoded by a finite state machine, which can achieve both the patterned motion control and the proportional force control. The sensory feedback is in the form of transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) with spatial-frequency modulation. To suppress the TENS interfering noise, the authors propose biphasic TENS to concentrate the stimulation current and the variable step-size least mean square adaptive filter to cancel the noise. Eight subjects participated in the validation experiments, including pattern selection and egg grasping tasks, to investigate the feasibility of the hybrid closed-loop control in clinical use.

The proposed noise cancellation method largely reduces the ES noise artifacts in the EMG electrodes by 18.5 dB on average. Compared with the open-loop control, the proposed hybrid closed-loop control method significantly improves both the pattern selection efficiency and the egg grasping success rate, both in blind operating scenarios (improved by 1.86 s, p < 0.001, and 63.7 per cent, p < 0.001) or in common operating scenarios (improved by 0.49 s, p = 0.008, and 41.3 per cent, p < 0.001).

The proposed hybrid closed-loop control method can be implemented on a prosthetic hand to improve the operation efficiency and accuracy for fragile objects such as eggs.

The primary contribution is the proposal of the hybrid closed-loop control, the spatial-frequency modulation method for the sensory feedback and the noise cancellation method for the integrating of the myoelectric control and the ES-based sensory feedback.

This paper aims to determine the most practically applicable color-difference formula for yarn-dyed fabrics woven from warp and weft yarns in different color depths and to establish color-difference tolerance for perceptibility by evaluating yarn-dyed fabrics visually and instrumentally.

A total of 108 sample pairs were evaluated by a panel of 13 observers with perceptibility method under three typical light sources (A, D65 and cool white fluorescent). The data sets were statistically analyzed by the homogeneity of variance test (F-test), analysis of variance, standardized residual sum of squares and performance factor/3.

Light sources had a slight influence on the visual assessments of yarn-dyed fabrics. Among the eight color-difference formulae for measurements of yarn-dyed fabrics, CIEDE2000(2:1:1) outperformed all other tested formulae, and the color tolerance for the perceptibility of CIEDE2000(2:1:1) was 0.62. When the homochromy index (K) of warp and weft yarns of yarn-dyed fabric was lower than 1.25, the color difference based on ΔE*00(2:1:1) between the two samples was acceptable in terms of the color tolerance for perceptibility (i.e. 0.62).

The warp and weft yarns in different color depths could be woven in fabric with a relatively uniform color appearance.

This study could contribute to cost savings by reusing disqualified dyed yarns during the weaving manufacturing process.

The purpose of this paper is to present a five-fingered, multisensory prosthetic hand integrating both intuitive myoelectric control and sensory feedback.

The artificial hand’s palm has a three-arcuate configuration and the thumb can move along a cone surface, improving the resemblance with the biological hand. By using a coupling linkage mechanism, each finger is independently actuated by a direct current motor. Both torque and position sensors are embedded in the finger to sense the hand’s status and its interaction with the outer environment. The proposed human-in-the-loop control system consists of an internal motion control scheme and an external human–machine interface. The pattern recognition-based electromyography (EMG) control scheme is adopted to control the motion of the hand, and the transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) is utilized to feedback the hand’s sensory information to its user.

The hand prototype shows that it has an anthropomorphic appearance (85 per cent to an average human hand), low weight (420 g), great power (10 N on the fingertip) and eligible dexterity. Clinical evaluation of the prosthetic hand on transradial amputees also approves the hand design.

From a systematic view, the paper details the design concepts of the HIT–DLR prosthetic hand IV, especially on its appearance, mechanism, myoelectric control and sensory feedback.

The purpose of this study is to present the state of the art for fiber Bragg grating (FBG) acceleration sensing technologies from two aspects: the principle of the measurement dimension and the principle of the sensing configuration. Some commercial sensors have also been introduced and future work in this field has also been discussed. This paper could provide an important reference for the research community.

This review is to present the state of the art for FBG acceleration sensing technologies from two aspects: the principle of the measurement dimension (one-dimension and multi-dimension) and the principle of the sensing configuration (beam type, radial vibration type, axial vibration type and other composite structures).

The current research on developing FBG acceleration sensors is mainly focused on the sensing method, the construction and design of the elastic structure and the design of a new information detection method. This paper hypothesizes that in the future, the following research trends will be strengthened: common single-mode fiber grating of the low cost and high utilization rate; high sensitivity and strength special fiber grating; multi-core fiber grating for measuring single-parameter multi-dimensional information or multi-parameter information; demodulating equipment of low cost, small volume and high sampling frequency.

The principle of the measurement dimension and principle of the sensing configuration for FBG acceleration sensors have been introduced, which could provide an important reference for the research community.

The mobile medical consultation (MMC) service is growing rapidly, but not all consumers are always willing to actively engage with it. To address this issue, based on IT identity theory, this study explores the underlying mechanism of how two types of platform-related consumer experience influence MMC platform identity, in turn, result in consumer negatively-valenced engagement in MMC.

The data was collected from 400 consumers with the experience of MMC and analyzed by the partial least square (PLS) method.

The findings unfold that these two distinct consumer experience, servicescape experience (i.e. perceived telepresence and perceived platform surveillance) and service search experience (i.e. perceived diagnosticity and perceived serendipity), are associated with MMC platform identity and consumer negatively valenced engagement with MMC.

Research on consumer negatively-valenced engagement in the field of MMC is still in a nascent stage. The study identifies consumer experience in accordance with the unique context of the MMC platform and fills the research gap on the role of IT identity in consumer negatively valenced engagement.

To explore income inequality in urban China, this paper investigates disparities between- and within-urban locals and rural migrants from 2002 to 2013, using three waves of the China Household Income Project (CHIP) data. While the existing literature concentrates on the wage disparity between these two groups, our results show that the Gini among the migrants increased by 17.86% between 2007 and 2013 and that among the locals increased by 15.54% from 2002 to 2007. The urban–migrant average income gap decreased during the whole period mainly due to higher growth in migrants’ average income. Estimates based on Mincerian earnings functions for both groups reveal the significant role of the education, occupation and type of contract in determining the within-group inequality. In addition, using a recentred influence function (RIF), we observe that short-term and other types of contracts, duration of the job, in-system ownership, marriage and skill have inequality-enhancing effects for migrants. The variation of skills has a larger impact on the income disparity among migrants than on that among urban locals. The RIF-based Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition of the mean difference of incomes shows that labour market discrimination between the two groups is not significant; however, both pure explained and unexplained differences are significant when applying the RIF decomposition to the variance of the logarithms of incomes. While the type of contract significantly reduces the pure explained difference between migrants and urban locals, occupation has a positive impact on this difference between these two groups. The heterogenity analysis shows that the factors influencing incomes in these two groups are different. We recommend labour market intervention to reduce unreasonable occupational and sectoral disparities, especially in the net inflow provinces, to mitigate urban inequality in China effectively.