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The purpose of this study is to propose a conceptual framework for measuring and managing employee-based brand equity. Drawing upon existing research, the authors argue that internal brand management should be approached from professional and socio-emotional perspectives.

The study establishes a comprehensive conceptual framework by thoroughly reviewing existing literature on employee-based brand equity and internal marketing. It builds upon existing research while adding unique insights to deepen the understanding of the subject.

The proposed conceptual framework highlights the importance of both professional and socio-emotional factors in building and managing employee-based brand equity. The framework emphasises the role of employees’ emotions, values and relationships in shaping their brand-related behaviours and their functional role in delivering brand promises.

This paper offers a theoretical foundation for future research in internal branding. However, the framework is not empirically tested, and further research is needed to validate and refine the framework. Organisations can develop more effective internal branding strategies that enhance brand equity by recognising the importance of both professional and socio-emotional factors in shaping employees’ brand-related behaviours.

Organisations can develop more effective internal branding strategies that enhance brand equity by recognising the importance of both professional and socio-emotional factors in shaping employees’ brand-related behaviours.

This study presents a novel approach to internal brand management, introducing a unique, dual-perspective model. This enriches the current body of literature and provides fresh insights for academics and practitioners in the field of marketing and brand management.

This empirical study aims to test the impact of four types of entrepreneurial context on the growth and success rates of new ventures in China and related the findings to the theory and practice of entrepreneurship dating back 2,500 years to ancient China.

After describing the business guidelines given by Fan Li, an entrepreneurial merchant selling Chinese medicines in ancient times, a conceptual framework was extracted as the basis for a discussion of the relationship between entrepreneurial context and entrepreneurial activity. Entrepreneurial context was conceptualized as being composed of family, social, business and institutional components. Five hypotheses about the influence of these different context variables on entrepreneurial activities were developed. From data compiled from the sampling of 239 business entrepreneurs in Beijing, a hierarchical regression was formed and the hypotheses tested.

The impact of entrepreneurial context on entrepreneurial activity can be divided into two layers, internal factors (e.g. family context) which are similar to “yin” (?) in the traditional Chinese philosophy while external factors (e.g. business, social and institutional contexts) were like “yang” (?). The two factors play different roles in entrepreneurial activities, while different contexts mediate and moderate each other in complex ways.

Research limitations pertain to the size and locale of the sample. A larger sample that involved subjects from different regions would facilitate a wider understanding of the effects of entrepreneurial context upon the entrepreneurial process.

The theory of entrepreneurial context is in its beginning stages, and the paper completed a systematic study of entrepreneurial context through theoretical model building using large-sample empirical research. In addition, the paper is the first ever to relate the theory and practice of entrepreneurship back 2,500 years. Through a multi-research methodology, the study clearly shows the critical importance of integrating Chinese history into the development of management theory.

Advancements in technology have led to many changes in the field of Library and Information Science (LIS). As global communications and technology continue to become more available and sophisticated, LIS programs need to prepare students for employment in rapidly changing and globalized LIS professions.

Data from a total of 63 programs from the American Library Association (ALA) and 32 programs from the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) was collected through openly accessible websites of these programs. Areas explored include program name, name and level of the academic unit offering the program, credit hours, required courses, percentage of required courses and capstone measurements used within the different LIS programs.

A majority of programs still preserve the keyword “Library” in their name, but not the academic units offering them. Most programs in ALA and CILIP follow a semester-based program. Research methods, internships, practical experience, combined with traditional library core and information technology requirements were found to constitute the major subjects in general. Comprehensive exams were replaced by e-portfolios among ALA programs while a dissertation remains the preferred choice of capstone requirement for CILIP.

Scant studies compare accredited LIS programs worldwide, motivating the study of the similarities, differences and trends of LIS programs under the current globalized technology-driven knowledge economy. This paper seeks to fill the literature gap and promote a global discussion and understanding of LIS curricula in different regions of the world, guiding potential students to select their suitable LIS programs.

Archival studies have long been a critical part of information education around the world. This paper attempts to provide a worldwide overview of archival education among main information schools worldwide and find out their similarity and differences to suggest measures for the development of archival education.

Quantitative research is conducted including ten elements of the iSchools' archival education which are (1) geographical distribution, (2) names of degrees, (3) names of concentration/specialization, (4) names of academic units offering the programs, (5) levels of academic units offering the programs, (6) study mode, (7) credit requirement for program completion, (8) percentage of required credits, (9) capstone requirements and (10) other accreditations. Programs among different regions are compared.

The study found that 43 out of 96 iSchool members from 13 countries/regions offer a total of 45 master's level archival education, and most of them are from North America. Both similarities and differences among the schools are identified and discussed.

This study’s findings suggest that iSchools may explore the possibility of organizing more conferences and forums to exchange ideas on archival studies and education issues. The iSchool community could contribute to this traditional field by attracting more members worldwide and cooperating with other accreditation organizations of archival education.

Most research on archival education focuses on just regional or country-based issues, and scant research explores a global view.

This study explores the learning and career motivation of the students who have chosen archival studies as their major in their master's degree programs, which has scant prior research.

The authors use a qualitative interview method to investigate the students' opinions and underlying reasons. Nine students from the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and University of British Columbia (UBC), both members of the iSchools, were interviewed. Considering the responses and research questions, the authors applied content analysis techniques to summarize data gathering from interviews into five themes to better interpret the meanings behind them.

Despite different development stages of archives sectors in Hong Kong and Canada, the learning and career motivation factors of these students from both universities share some similar characteristics and can also be divided into intrinsic factors (such as personal interests, personalities) and extrinsic factors (such as prior working experience, working environment, nature of archives work and development of the archives field). Both intrinsic and extrinsic factors significantly influenced them in choosing archival studies as major in their graduate studies.

These findings can help educators and professions review and improve the curricula as well as promote the profession to the public and attract more people to pursue their studies in the archives field.

Scant studies discussed the career development and education motivation of archivists, especially related to Asia.

This study aims to examine the deterrent effect of the Market Abuse Directive (MAD) introduced in the European Union in 2003. The purpose is to evaluate whether the Directive has resulted in significant changes in pre-bid stock price run-ups observed in mergers and acquisitions within the Portuguese, Spanish and Greek stock markets.

The study analyzes a sample of 199 mergers and acquisitions in the aforementioned stock markets. The magnitude of pre-bid stock price run-ups is investigated as an indicator of illegal insider trading. The effects of the MAD, toehold positions of bidders and industry similarity between firms involved in the deals are assessed using statistical analysis.

The study’s findings indicate that the MAD has been ineffective in deterring investors from trading on non-public information. Pre-announcement price run-ups remain significant, suggesting ongoing illegal insider trading practices. Additionally, the research reveals that pre-bid stock price run-ups tend to be lower when bidders have established a larger toehold position in the target and when the firms involved in the deal belong to the same industry.

This study contributes to the existing literature by providing empirical evidence on the ineffectiveness of the MAD in deterring illegal insider trading. The findings highlight the limitations of increasing penalties without an effective monitoring system in place. Furthermore, the study identifies additional factors, such as toehold positions and industry similarity, that influence the magnitude of pre-announcement price run-ups in mergers and acquisitions.

The purpose of this paper is to present a novel algorithm for image inpainting, which has been widely used for removing unwanted objects from images or reconstructing damaged photographs.

An image piecewise inpainting technique based on radial basis function (RBF) is used to transform the 2D image inpainting problem into 3D implicit surface reconstruction problem. And a RBF center reduction method is proposed. By RBF resampling, the algorithm can nicely fix the damaged image or remove specific objects.

Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms can prevent the edge blur caused by the isotropic character of RBF, and effectively reduce the RBF centers without a loss in accuracy.

The proposed inpainting approach is interesting for its combination of RBF method and region segmentation that can handle the restoring of high‐variation areas.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between green initiatives, green performance, and a firm’s financial performance in the world. The existing literature on environmental initiatives and their impacts is limited to the context of a particular country. This gap points to a lack of clarification of variations in environmental regulation and in economic disparity which may affect the impact of green initiatives on green performance and on financial performance.

Data on the world top 500 publicly traded companies are collected from Compustat, a database of financial, statistical and market information on global companies, and from Newsweek, an information gatekeeper that enables consumers to access a list of environmentally friendly companies. The paper adopts linear regression to test the relationships between variables.

The results show that green initiatives have a positive impact on green performance, which in turn has a positive impact on financial performance. However, the impact of green initiatives varies by country. The study revealed that companies in European countries and Canada lead in the green initiatives and green performance, followed by the USA and Japan. China and Hong Kong lag behind compared to other countries.

The small sample size in some of the countries used in this study may impact the validity of the results.

This study suggests that companies that seek financial benefits of pursuing green initiatives should have a long-term orientation when implementing these initiatives and should consider the country where they operate.

The current study provides a global understanding of the relationship between green initiatives, green performance, and financial performance, and contributes to the literature by highlighting variation among countries and by year.

Nowadays, automotive engines are controlled by electronic control units (ECUs), and the engine idle speed performance is significantly affected by the setup of control parameters in the ECU. The engine ECU tune‐up is done empirically through tests on a dynamometer (dyno). In this way, a lot of time, fuel and human resources are consumed, while the optimal control parameters may not be obtained. The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel ECU setup optimization approach for engine idle speed control.

In the first phase of the approach, Latin hypercube sampling (LHS) and a multi‐input/output least squares support vector machine (LS‐SVM) is proposed to build up an engine idle speed model based on dyno test data, and then a genetic algorithm (GA) is applied to obtain optimal ECU setting automatically subject to various user‐defined constraints.

The study shows that the predicted results using the estimated model from LS‐SVM are in good agreement with the actual test results. Moreover, the optimization results show a significant improvement on idle speed performance in a test engine.

As the methodology is generic it can be applied to different vehicle control optimization problems.

The research is the first attempt to integrate a couple of paradigms (LHS, multi‐input/output LS‐SVM and GA) into a general framework for constrained multivariable optimization problems under insufficient system information. The proposed multi‐input/output LS‐SVM for modelling of multi‐input/output systems is original, because the traditional LS‐SVM modelling approach is suitable for multi‐input, but single output systems. Finally, this is the first use of the novel integrated framework for automotive engine idle‐speed control optimization.