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This paper aims to examine the attractiveness of the Tong Ren Tang (TRT) as a Chinese corporate heritage tourism brand and consider the significance of TRT for Chinese national identity. The study considers the saliency of Balmer’s augmented role identity notion vis-à-vis corporate heritage institutions/corporate brands. Insights are made from and for corporate heritage, heritage tourism and national identity literature.

A conceptual model comprising five hypotheses was developed and this informed a survey-based questionnaire administered to domestic tourists/customers visiting Tong Ren Tang’s flagship shop in Beijing.

The attractiveness to domestic Chinese tourists/customers of the TRT corporate heritage tourism brand was found to be attributable to its multiple role identities: national, corporate, temporal, familial and imperial. As such, this study lends credence to Balmer’s augmented role identity notion. Chinese domestic tourists/customers – as members of an ethnic Chinese community – in visiting TRT not only consume an extant corporate heritage by tangible and intangible means but can also be seen to express, and reaffirm, their sense of Chinese national identity.

For TRT’s managers, there should be an appreciation that the attractiveness of TRT as a corporate heritage tourism brand rests not only on what it sells but also in what it symbolises in national and cultural terms. This finding is applicable to the managers of many other corporate heritage/corporate heritage tourism brands.

Adopting a primordial perspective, the TRT pharmacy was found to be of singular significance to China’s national identity. Traditional Chinese Medicine, Confucian and Daoist religious/philosophical and China’s erstwhile Imperial polity are significant and enduring precepts of Chinese national identity. As such the TRT flagship shop/brand is of singular importance, as China has eviscerated much of its cultural heritage – particularly in relation to its corporate heritage brands.

This is the first empirical study to focus on corporate heritage tourism brands and one of the first studies to examine a Chinese corporate heritage/corporate heritage tourism brand. Also significant in focussing on the TRT corporate heritage brand. Established in 1669, TRT’s history spans five centuries: a corporate provenance which is exceptional within the People’s Republic of China. The study links the corporate brand notion with the nascent corporate heritage brand domain and the established area of heritage tourism.

We compare environmental impacts associated with incoming foreign direct investment versus domestic capital in China. We use aggregate data on Chinese provinces’ economic and pollution indicators to explore the effects of the financial origin of fixed capital. Our simultaneous models consider three prime channels through which these effects work: economic scale, sectoral composition, and pollution intensity. Results show that emissions associated with foreign financed capital are lower than with domestically financed capital for some but not all of the considered types of pollution.

Most decision-making problems in construction are complex and difficult to solve, as they involve multiple criteria and multiple decision makers in addition to subjective uncertainties, imprecisions and vagueness surrounding the decision-making process. In many instances, the decision-making process is based on linguistic terms rather than numerical values. Hence, structured fuzzy consensus-reaching processes and fuzzy aggregation methods are instrumental in multi-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) problems for capturing the point of view of a group of experts. This chapter outlines different fuzzy consensus-reaching processes and fuzzy aggregation methods. It presents the background of the basic theory and formulation of these processes and methods, as well as numerical examples that illustrate their theory and formulation. Application areas of fuzzy consensus reaching and fuzzy aggregation in the construction domain are identified, and an overview of previously developed frameworks for fuzzy consensus reaching and fuzzy aggregation is provided. Finally, areas for future work are presented that highlight emerging trends and the imminent needs of fuzzy consensus reaching and fuzzy aggregation in the construction domain.

This article provides a critical review of four constructs-organizational identification, organizational commitment, occupational identification, and occupational commitment-to advance our understanding about how public sector employees from different occupations may become psychologically attached to their organizations. This review is intended to clarify previous inconsistencies as well as spark new interest among public administration researchers to examine sources and consequences of public employees’ organizational identification and commitment. This article also elucidates about how public sector employees’ attachment to their occupations may influence their attachment to their organizations. In that effort, this article reviews interrelationships among the four constructs. Finally, based on the patterns of connections observed, a future research program including seven testable research propositions is proposed.

We examine the mode of international expansion as an equilibrium governance contract between home country and host country factor owner. The focus is on agency costs, a form of transactions costs. Two phenomena are shown to be related to the agency costs imposed by factor owners: (i) the choice of different modes of international expansion by one firm in different locations, and (ii) the simultaneous occurrence of several forms of foreign involvement in the same location. We attempt to characterize the dynamic relationship between the mode of an offshore operation and changes in factor market conditions that affect agency costs.

In this chapter, we present our ongoing efforts in developing and sustaining interdisciplinary STEM undergraduate programs at North Carolina A&T State University (NCA&T) – a state-supported HBCU and National Science Foundation (NSF) Historically Black Colleges and Universities Undergraduate Program (HBCU-UP) Institutional Implementation Project grantee. Through three rounds of NSF HBCU-UP implementation grants, a concerted effort has been made in developing interdisciplinary STEM undergraduate research programs in geophysical and environmental science (in round 1), geospatial, computational, and information science (in round 2), and mathematical and computational biology (in round 3) on NCA&T campus. We first present a brief history and background information about the interdisciplinary STEM undergraduate research programs developed and sustained at NCA&T, giving rationales on how these programs had been conceived, and summarizing what have been achieved. Next we give a detailed description on the development of undergraduate research infrastructure including building research facilities through multiple and leveraged funding sources, and engaging a core of committed faculty mentors and research collaborators. We then present, as case studies, some sample interdisciplinary research projects in which STEM undergraduate students were engaged and project outcomes. Successes associated to our endeavor in developing undergraduate research programs as well as challenges and opportunities on implementing and sustaining these efforts are discussed. Finally, we discuss the impact of well-structured undergraduate research training on student success in terms of academic performance, graduation rate and continuing graduate study, and summarize many of the learnings we have gained from implementation and delivery of undergraduate research experiences at HBCUs.

Contemporary literature reveals that, to date, the poultry livestock sector has not received sufficient research attention. This particular industry suffers from unstructured supply chain practices, lack of awareness of the implications of the sustainability concept and failure to recycle poultry wastes. The current research thus attempts to develop an integrated supply chain model in the context of poultry industry in Bangladesh. The study considers both sustainability and supply chain issues in order to incorporate them in the poultry supply chain. By placing the forward and reverse supply chains in a single framework, existing problems can be resolved to gain economic, social and environmental benefits, which will be more sustainable than the present practices.

The theoretical underpinning of this research is ‘sustainability’ and the ‘supply chain processes’ in order to examine possible improvements in the poultry production process along with waste management. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and ‘design science’ methods with the support of system dynamics (SD) and the case study methods. Initially, a mental model is developed followed by the causal loop diagram based on in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and observation techniques. The causal model helps to understand the linkages between the associated variables for each issue. Finally, the causal loop diagram is transformed into a stock and flow (quantitative) model, which is a prerequisite for SD-based simulation modelling. A decision support system (DSS) is then developed to analyse the complex decision-making process along the supply chains.

The findings reveal that integration of the supply chain can bring economic, social and environmental sustainability along with a structured production process. It is also observed that the poultry industry can apply the model outcomes in the real-life practices with minor adjustments. This present research has both theoretical and practical implications. The proposed model’s unique characteristics in mitigating the existing problems are supported by the sustainability and supply chain theories. As for practical implications, the poultry industry in Bangladesh can follow the proposed supply chain structure (as par the research model) and test various policies via simulation prior to its application. Positive outcomes of the simulation study may provide enough confidence to implement the desired changes within the industry and their supply chain networks.