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The government has included social media technology applications in the public sector as part of the fifth wave of information and communications technology adoption. Academic interest in social media in the government sector has been increasing. But there has been little empirical research on the assimilation of social media in the local government. To fill this gap, based on technology–organization–environment (TOE) framework, this study aims to investigate the key technological, organizational and environmental factors that affect the assimilation of social media in local government agencies.

To empirically test the model, a survey study was conducted. Data were collected from 150 government employees in the government department of X municipal government in China. The collected data were analysed quantitatively to answer five hypotheses using structural equation model.

The findings suggest that technology competence, top management support, perceived benefits and citizen readiness significantly influence assimilation of social media in local government agencies. Top management support is the strongest predictor of social media assimilation in a government agency.

This study is one of the first attempts that adopted the TOE framework to understand assimilation of social media in the local government. In addition, the effect of the four factors that include one technological factor, two organizational factors and one environmental factor, namely, technology competence, top management support, perceived benefits and citizen readiness, on intention to assimilate social media was investigated.

To gain an in-depth understanding and provide direction to governments on their quality measurement practices related to open government data (OGD), this paper aims to develop a common frame of reference for quality assessment of OGD.

Qualitative meta-synthesis was used to synthesize previous studies on the quality measurement of OGD. This paper applies a meta-synthesis approach to integrate 10 qualitative studies into a common frame of reference for quality assessment of OGD.

Based on a seven-step meta-synthesis, the paper proposes a common frame of reference for quality assessment of OGD, which includes six indicators, namely, accuracy, accessibility, completeness, timeliness, consistency and understandability.

A common frame of reference for quality assessment of OGD will help researchers better understand the quality assessment of OGD and government agencies to improve the quality of OGD that they publish.

This study aims to investigate whether and how earnings guidance affects corporate innovation.

Exploiting the setting of China, where the Shenzhen Stock Exchange has required all public firms listed on its ChiNext board to issue earnings guidance since 2012, this study uses a difference-in-differences (DID) methodology to examine the effect of earnings guidance on corporate innovation and further conducts cross-sectional analyzes from the information risk and monitoring demand perspectives. Moreover, the authors conduct path analysis to verify the possible channels through which corporate innovation is impeded by market pressure or improved through increased corporate transparency.

This study documents a positive relationship between earnings guidance and corporate innovation, as measured by the number of invention patents, indicating that the “corporate governance” hypothesis dominates in China. Cross-sectional analyzes show that this positive effect is more pronounced for firms subject to greater information risk and monitoring demand. Finally, the path analysis further confirms that earnings guidance improves innovation by increasing corporate transparency.

First, this study captures the bright side of mandatory earnings guidance and suggests that increasing the disclosure frequency can yield benefits for firms. Second, the findings imply that regulations, regardless of what they refer to, should be based on a country’s specific context.

First, this study provides evidence supporting the “corporate governance” argument based on the context of China and, thus contributes to the debate on earnings guidance. Second, this study enriches the literature on the economic consequences of earnings guidance. Third, the study extends research on the determinants of corporate innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate masculinity in Chinese social media marketing for global luxury fashion brands through two studies.

Study 1 compares physical characteristics of males in visually oriented US (Instagram) and Chinese (Weibo) social media posts promoting global luxury fashion magazine brands (e.g. Vogue, Cosmopolitan, GQ and Esquire). Study 2 examines the prevalence of and Chinese consumers’ responses (reposts, comments and likes) to different masculinities depicted in luxury fashion brand-sponsored Weibo posts.

Male portrayals for Chinese audiences feature more characteristics associated with emerging East Asian hybrid masculinities – “Little Fresh Meat” (LFM) and “Old Grilled Meat” (OGM) – than associated with global or regional hegemonic masculinity (i.e. the scholarly Wén and action-oriented Wu). Wén remains common in social media posts for luxury fashion goods, but LFM and OGM engender more consumer responses.

Chinese luxury fashion marketing depicts masculinity more similarly to other East Asian marketing than to Western marketing. Some luxury fashion brands are struggling for acceptance among Chinese youth. Luxury fashion marketers should incorporate hybrid rather than hegemonic masculinities to prompt more favorable responses among Chinese consumers, especially younger female target markets.

Growing female occupational and consumer power and shifting male employment from blue-collar to white-collar jobs have influenced media portrayals of masculinity. Social media marketing for luxury fashion brands demonstrates the prevalence and appeal of hybrid masculinities in China.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify agricultural services into five categories, including agricultural materials supply service, financial service, technical service, machinery service and processing and sales service, and to examine the effect of agricultural services on cost saving of rice production in China.

Based on a three-year panel data set covering 3,421 rice farmers in 12 Chinese provinces collected from the state rice industry experiment stations’ fixed watch points of China Agriculture Research System, a stochastic frontier model which takes the price vectors of input variables into cost function is developed by stochastic frontier analysis method in the study.

There is a deviation between the actual cost and the minimum cost on rice production in China due to the loss of cost efficiency, whose score is 0.7983 at the mean. Agricultural services can help improve cost efficiency, thus contributing to cost saving. Specifically, the effect of technical service on cost saving is the highest, followed by processing and sales service, machinery service, financial service and agricultural materials supply service.

The results of this paper are of great significance to the effectiveness and efficiency of the targeted agricultural services and indicate implications for policy improvement under the context of clear upward trend of agricultural production costs.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a common remaining shelf life prediction model that is generally applicable for postharvest table grape using an optimized radial basis function (RBF) neural network to achieve more accurate prediction than the current shelf life (SL) prediction methods.

First, the final indicators (storage temperature, relative humidity, sensory average score, peel hardness, soluble solids content, weight loss rate, rotting rate, fragmentation rate and color difference) affecting SL were determined by the correlation and significance analysis. Then using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to calculate the weight of each indicator and determine the end of SL under different storage conditions. Subsequently, the structure of the RBF network redesigned was 9-11-1. Ultimately, the membership degree of Fuzzy clustering (fuzzy c-means) was adopted to optimize the center and width of the RBF network by using the training data.

The results show that this method has the highest prediction accuracy compared to the current the kinetic–Arrhenius model, back propagation (BP) network and RBF network. The maximum absolute error is 1.877, the maximum relative error (RE) is 0.184, and the adjusted R² is 0.911. The prediction accuracy of the kinetic–Arrhenius model is the worst. The RBF network has a better prediction accuracy than the BP network. For robustness, the adjusted R² are 0.853 and 0.886 of Italian grape and Red Globe grape, respectively, and the fitting degree are the highest among all methods, which proves that the optimized method is applicable for accurate SL prediction of different table grape varieties.

This study not only provides a new way for the prediction of SL of different grape varieties, but also provides a reference for the quality and safety management of table grape during storage. Maybe it has a further research significance for the application of RBF neural network in the SL prediction of other fresh foods.

The purpose of this study is to propose a new consumer value segmentation method for low-dimensional dense market datasets to quickly detect and cluster the most profitable customers for the enterprises.

In this study, the comprehensive segmentation bases (CSB) with richer meanings were obtained by introducing the weighted recency-frequency-monetary (RFM) model into the common segmentation bases (SB). Further, a new market segmentation method, the CSB-MBK algorithm was proposed by integrating the CSB model and the mini-batch k-means (MBK) clustering algorithm.

The results show that our proposed CSB model can reflect consumers' contributions to a market, as well as improve the clustering performance. Moreover, the proposed CSB-MBK algorithm is demonstrably superior to the SB-MBK, CSB-KMA and CSB-Chameleon algorithms with respect to the Silhouette Coefficient (SC), the Calinski-Harabasz (CH) Index , the average running time and superior to the SB-MBK, RFM-MBK and WRFM-MBK algorithms in terms of the inter-market value and characteristic differentiation.

This paper provides a tool for decision-makers and marketers to segment a market quickly, which can help them grasp consumers' activity, loyalty, purchasing power and other characteristics in a target market timely and achieve the precision marketing.

This study is the first to introduce the CSB-MBK algorithm for identifying valuable customers through the comprehensive consideration of the clustering quality, consumer value and segmentation speed. Moreover, the CSB-MBK algorithm can be considered for applications in other markets.

Before the turn of the century, taking overseas students was more about a diplomatic issue dominated by the state in China, for which reason this section is relatively independent within the higher education system. However, evidence from a series of new policy documents and their impacts suggests that international student mobility (ISM) has been intensively shaped by the central government in the desire to promote its national strategy, namely the belt and road initiative. ISM policy, although with a significant proportion marketized, was introduced for a clear purpose of cultural diplomacy. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Looking beyond the debate of market-driven vs state-dominated, this paper attempts to provide a thorough understanding of this changing pattern based on examination of key changes of policy statements along with official data analysis.

This paper argues that the new pattern must be understood against a context of a hierarchy of higher education institutes in contemporary China: a sector led by a small number of prestigious universities generously funded by the central government with a large number of ordinary universities underfunded and eager to generate income. Prestigious institutes enroll international students to satisfy performance indicators listed by policies like “Double First-rate”; other universities, benefiting from the reputation and momentum generated by the top ones, take self-funded students for profit.

By making good use of both performance indicators and market motives, the country managed to move a state-dominated ISM policy in the twentieth century into the existing state-steering marketization model and made China a major destination for overseas study.

Tourism is a labor-intensive sector with extensive links to other industries and plays a vital role in creating employment. This study aims to propose a new framework to analyze the intrinsic structure of the employment effects of tourism-related sectors and their drivers.

This study uses input–output and structural decomposition analysis (IO-SDA) to quantify the employment effects of tourism-related sectors and their driving mechanisms based on China’s I-O tables of 2002, 2007, 2012 and 2017.

The results show a declining trend in the intensity of direct or indirect employment effects in tourism-related sectors, indicating a decreasing number of jobs directly or indirectly required to create a unit of tourism output. Among tourism-related sectors, catering has the highest intensity of indirect employment effects over the study period. Catering stimulates the indirect employment of agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, fishery and food and tobacco manufacturing. The decomposition analysis reveals that final demand is the largest contributor to the increase in tourism employment, while technological progress shifts from an employment-creation effect in 2002–2012 to an employment-destruction effect in 2012–2017.

This study proposes a new analytical framework to investigate the structural proportional relationship between the direct and indirect employment effects of various tourism-related sectors and their dynamic changes. Doing so, it provides valuable references for policymakers to promote tourism employment.

旅游相关部门就业效应的驱动因素：以中国为例

摘要

旅游业是一个劳动密集型部门, 与其他国民经济部门有着广泛的联系, 这在创造就业方面发挥着重要作用。本研究旨在建立一个框架, 分析旅游相关部门就业效应的内在结构及其驱动因素。

本研究基于中国2002年、2007年、2012年和2017年的投入产出表, 引入投入产出和结构分解分析（IO-SDA）法量化了旅游相关行业的就业效应及其变化的驱动机制。

旅游相关部门的直接或间接就业强度呈下降趋势, 可见创造一个单位的旅游产出所需的直接或间接工作数量在减少。在旅游相关部门中, 餐饮部门在研究期内的间接就业效应强度最高, 主要带动了农、林、牧、渔业和食品及烟草制造业的间接就业。旅游就业效应变动的驱动因素中, 最终需求是旅游就业效应增加的最大贡献者, 技术效应从2002-2012年期间的就业创造效应转变为2012-2017年期间的就业破坏效应。

本研究建立了一个全新的分析框架, 可以揭示各个旅游相关部门的直接和间接就业效应之间的结构比例关系及其动态变化。对旅游就业效应的驱动因素分析可以为政策制定者提供针对性的建议, 以促进旅游就业。

Factores que impulsan los efectos del empleo en los sectores relacionados con el turismo: El caso de China continental

Resumen

El turismo es un sector intensivo en mano de obra con amplios vínculos con otras industrias y desempeña un papel vital en la creación de empleo. Este estudio propone un nuevo marco para analizar la estructura intrínseca de los efectos en el empleo de los sectores relacionados con el turismo y sus impulsores.

Este estudio utiliza el análisis de entrada-salida (input-output) y de descomposición estructural (structural decomposition) (IO-SDA) para cuantificar los efectos sobre el empleo en los sectores relacionados con el turismo y sus mecanismos impulsores, basándose en las tablas input-output de China de 2002, 2007, 2012 y 2017.

Los resultados muestran una tendencia a la baja en la intensidad de los efectos directos o indirectos del empleo en los sectores relacionados con el turismo, lo que indica un número cada vez menor de puestos de trabajo directos o indirectos necesarios para crear una unidad de producción turística. Entre los sectores relacionados con el turismo, la restauración tiene la mayor intensidad de efectos indirectos sobre el empleo durante el periodo de estudio. La restauración estimula el empleo indirecto de la agricultura, la silvicultura, la ganadería, la pesca y la fabricación de alimentos y tabaco. El análisis de descomposición revela que la demanda final es la que más contribuye al aumento del empleo turístico, mientras que el progreso tecnológico pasa de ser un efecto de creación de empleo en 2002-2012 a un efecto de destrucción de empleo en 2012-2017.

Este estudio propone un nuevo marco analítico para investigar la relación estructural proporcional entre los efectos directos e indirectos del empleo de varios sectores relacionados con el turismo y sus cambios dinámicos. De este modo, proporciona valiosas referencias para que los responsables políticos promuevan el empleo en el sector turístico.

In light of the current challenges in the business environment, firms, particularly those involved in supply chains, must foster innovation. In this context, the current study employs the theory of dynamic organizational capabilities (DOCs) to track supply chain learning capabilities (SCLCs) and independently uncover their relationship to innovation at both the product and process levels. Similarly, the study intends to investigate the influence of technological turbulence (TT) on these relationships as a moderating variable.

The data were gathered using in-person interviews with 189 CEOs with some supply chain management proficiency from small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the industrial zones of eastern Egypt. The study used a survey approach to collect data, and the SEM-PLS technique was utilized to analyze the data.

Study findings revealed that SCLCs positively affect product and process innovation. In addition, TT positively moderates the relationship between SCLCs and product and process innovation, except for risk-taking capability. Further theoretical and practical implications are derived from the study findings.

This research adds to the knowledge of the dynamic capabilities theory (DCT), which affects how firms interact with their external environment. Studying learning capabilities are employed as essential competencies to counterbalance high levels of TT in the external environment in terms of innovative performance and vice versa if firms do not attempt to strengthen their dynamic learning capabilities in supply chains. In addition, this study contributes to the literature by studying learning capabilities from the external perspective, where SCLCs are being developed as a new variable to improve innovation.