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Aiding employment is an important poverty reduction strategy in many countries’ social welfare systems, as this strategy can help empower the recipients with a better living standard, development and social inclusion. The purpose of this paper is to identify the most significant individual and systematic variables for the employment status of low-income groups in urban China.

The data of this study are drawn from “Social Policy Support System for Poverty-stricken Families in Urban and Rural China 2015” report. The Ministry of Civil Affairs of the People’s Republic of China appointed and funded the Institute of Social Science Survey (ISSS) at Peking University to deliver the related project and organize a research team to write the report. Multiple binary logistic regression analysis is adopted to identify both individual and systematic factors that affect the employment status among low-income groups in urban China.

According to the results of the binary logistic regression model, individual factors, including: gender; householder status; education; and self-rated health status, play a significant role in determining the employment status of low-income groups in urban China. Clearly, the impacts of individual factors are more influential to marginal families than to families entitled to receive Basic Living Allowance. In contrast, compared with marginal families, systematic factors are more influential to families entitled to receive Basic Living Allowance.

This study highlights the importance of precise poverty reduction strategy and the issue of “welfare dependence” among low-income groups in urban China. Policy recommendations derived from the findings are hence given, including: the promotion of family-friendly policies; the introduction of a smart healthcare system; the establishment of a Basic Living Allowance adjustment mechanism; and the provision of related social services.

This chapter explores a descriptive theory of multidimensional travel behaviour, estimation of quantitative models and demonstration in an agent-based microsimulation.

A descriptive theory on multidimensional travel behaviour is conceptualised. It theorizes multidimensional knowledge updating, search start/stopping criteria and search/decision heuristics. These components are formulated or empirically modelled and integrated in a unified and coherent approach.

The theory is supported by empirical observations and the derived quantitative models are tested by an agent-based simulation on a demonstration network.

Based on artificially intelligent agents, learning and search theory and bounded rationality, this chapter makes an effort to embed a sound theoretical foundation for the computational process approach and agent-based micro-simulations. A pertinent new theory is proposed with experimental observations and estimations to demonstrate agents with systematic deviations from the rationality paradigm. Procedural and multidimensional decision-making are modelled. The numerical experiment highlights the capabilities of the proposed theory in estimating rich behavioural dynamics.

One of the solutions to manage large public projects that are complex and difficult to manage is through relationship management. Although formal and relational approaches have been adopted in managing relationships, it is widely recognized that participants from developed and developing economies have different mindsets toward these two approaches. The purpose of this paper is hence to elucidate the more effective practices for managers to manage relationships in large public projects that are in countries of different sizes and stages of development.

A structured questionnaire survey was conducted. Multiple stakeholders involved in public construction projects in Singapore and China that include public sector clients and consultants, private sector contractors and conszultants, were approached for data collection to provide information on one of their completed large public project.

Both Singapore and China primarily adopt contractual governance by making rational decisions, pursuing profit and using the contract to guard against trouble. Participants in Singapore are more deeply committed and work more collaboratively than their counterparts in China. Project partners in China build stronger relationships, which may be due to the importance of “guanxi” to conduct business activities there.

The comparative study provides managers with different sets of governance practices to adopt to improve the relationships with public clients in large public projects under different environments. In large public projects in developed countries, participants should rely more on relational practices that show commitment and teamwork, while those in developing countries participate in activities that build up their social networks.

This paper aims to examine the existing literature on firms’ power through the lens of the supply chain and highlights some gaps that could be covered by future research.

This study uses a systematic framework-based review combining the insights of the antecedents, decisions and outcomes (ADO) and theories, contexts and methods (TCM) frameworks. The review was carried out using a sample of 108 articles published between 1984 and 2022 in 25 prestigious journals.

The ADO framework maps out the state of the art of the antecedents of power (i.e. sources and types of firm power), the decision to use power and the effect that exercising power over other firms may have on firm performance and the quality of inter-firm relationships. In addition, this framework highlights factors that mediate or moderate the decision to exercise power and the factors that mediate or moderate the outcomes of exercising power or power asymmetry. The TCM framework provides insights into the theories, contexts (i.e. countries, industries, level of analysis and sources of data) and methods used by the existing literature. The content analysis using the aforementioned frameworks provides the basis to elaborate propositions for future research on power in the supply chain from the perspective of gender differences.

This systematic literature review offers a comprehensive guide for researchers to understand the antecedents, decisions and outcomes of firm power in the supply chain, as well as the TCM used in the literature. The content analysis using frameworks provides a road map to investigate the proposed factors that might moderate the decision to exercise power and the outcome of exercising power or power asymmetry from the perspective of gender differences. In addition, based on content analysis, the authors make propositions about TCM that could be applied in future research.

From a practical perspective, this systematic literature review may help managers to better understand the sources and consequences of their firm’s power. This would allow managers to make better decisions when negotiating with their supply chain parties, which could potentially lead to better performance for their firms and the whole supply chain.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to conduct a comprehensive systematic literature review of the different dimensions of firms’ power in the supply chain.

Researchers and practitioners recognize whistleblowers and the media as disparate control agents to uncover fraud and corruption in and by organizations. However, whistleblowing is mainly studied in relation to individual and organizational antecedents. Social norms and in particular the media as a form of social norm influence or norm conveyer on whistleblowing are largely unexplored. In this paper, I study the influence of perceived critical media coverage (i.e., whether media are perceived as criticizing fraud and corruption) on whistleblowing intentions (WBI) on fraud and corruption. I draw on norm activation theory to develop a moderation-mediation model of whistleblowing to highlight how the media can convey social norms influencing WBI. Using a cross-national survey of employees from China, Germany, and Russia (n = 1,159), I hypothesize and find that media directly influence employee attitudes toward fraud and corruption as well as the likelihood to whistle blow. Critical media coverage also reduces the influence of descriptive norms by co-worker misconduct on attitudes and the negative influence of fear of retaliation on WBI. This paper is the first to highlight the importance of critical mass media on whistleblowing decisions. My findings suggest that the media influence potential whistleblowers in a way that can be described along the lines of “I report if they report.”

This study focused on how to realize automatic recognition of young women's neck-shoulder shape based on the front and side images.

The reverse engineering software was used to measure the body sizes of the neck-shoulder part based on the young women's three-dimensional (3D) point cloud data, and the important parameters closely related to the neck-shoulder shape were determined. The neck-shoulder shape of the subjects was classified to establish the classification rules. Then, based on the front and side images, the human body contour was extracted by Matlab, and the data required for neck-shoulder shape classification were obtained by identifying the feature points.

Through the cluster analysis based on the shoulder angle, back angle, shoulder depth/width ratio and armpit depth/width ratio, young women's neck-shoulder shape was divided into four categories, namely round wide shoulder, flat narrow shoulder, round drop shoulder and hunchback flat shoulder. The neck-shoulder shape could be automatically recognized based on the established classification rules and two-dimensional (2D) body measurement method, with an accuracy rate of 90%. The neck-shoulder shape automatic recognition system constructed based on this method is effective.

This study proposed a simple neck-shoulder automatic recognition method based on the 2D body images. This approach can be extended to other group of human body or other parts of the body.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the initial corrosion behavior of pure Mg, AZ31 and AZ91 alloys in phosphate buffer solution (PBS) and to characterize the features in corrosion type and resistance of the corrosion product layer.

The scanning electron microscopy, equipped with energy-dispersive spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy have been used to characterize the as-corroded samples. Besides, the Mg²⁺ concentration in PBSs has been determined by inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrum.

It has been found that pure Mg suffers pit corrosion, and AZ31 initially undergoes pit corrosion and then uniform corrosion dominates with an extended immersion duration. However, AZ91 exhibits the uniform corrosion with the highest corrosion rate among the three materials. Besides, the corrosion product layer on AZ31 has the best compactness and corrosion resistance.

The findings add depth in understanding the corrosion of pure Mg and its alloys in PBS and also have guiding significance in exploring the effects by alloyed elements to develop new biomaterials with better performance.