Search results

Fast‐developed IT products have had a great impact on high technology business. With increases of foreign investments flowing into Chinese IT markets, the impact of national culture and ethnicity on consumer behaviour has become a recognized issue. The main purpose of this paper is to examine how Chinese and western national culture differences significantly influence IT customers' purchasing decisions underlying Chinese IT markets.

A structured survey was used for this study. Owing to the difficulties of covering huge geographic areas in China, the two largest and modern cities, Beijing and Shanghai, were chosen as the target cities where the 200 questionnaires were distributed to both Chinese and western customers.

By sampling US customers as representative of western nations, different choices regarding using text message service, cell phones and personal digital assistant are compared between Chinese and US customers. The results indicate that the Chinese customer tends to be more a follower of his “friends” than to be “myself” compared with western customers.

The significant impact of national culture differences on IT products has not been fully acknowledged yet, particularly vis‐à‐vis of the Chinese markets. This research provides insights into the IT industry and market by comparing consumer behaviours between Chinese and US customers. The results can be a guide for IT products manufacturers who in particular are interested in high technology business in mainland China.

A higher-order Reissner-Mindlin plate element method is presented based on the framework of assumed stress quasi-conforming method and Hellinger-Reissner variational principle. A novel six-node triangular plate element is proposed by utilizing this method for the static and free vibration analysis of Reissner-Mindlin plates.

First, the initial assumed stress field is derived by using the fundamental analytical solutions which satisfy all governing equations. Then the stress matrix is treated as the weighted function to weaken the strain-displacement equations after the strains are derived by using the constitutive equations. Finally, the arbitrary order Timoshenko beam function is adopted as the string-net functions along each side of the element for strain integration.

The proposed element can pass patch test and is free from shear locking and spurious zero energy modes. Numerical tests show that the element can give high-accurate solutions, good convergence and is a good competitor to other models.

This work gives new formulations to develop high-order Reissner-Mindlin plate element, and the new strategy exhibits advantages of both analytical and discrete methods.

A simple shape-free high-order hybrid displacement function element method is presented for precise bending analyses of Mindlin–Reissner plates. Three distortion-resistant and locking-free eight-node plate elements are proposed by utilizing this method.

This method is based on the principle of minimum complementary energy, in which the trial functions for resultant fields are derived from two displacement functions, F and f, and satisfy all governing equations. Meanwhile, the element boundary displacements are determined by the locking-free arbitrary order Timoshenko’s beam functions. Then, three locking-free eight-node, 24-DOF quadrilateral plate-bending elements are formulated: HDF-P8-23β for general cases, HDF-P8-SS1 for edge effects along soft simply supported (SS1) boundary and HDF-P8-FREE for edge effects along free boundary.

The proposed elements can pass all patch tests, exhibit excellent convergence and possess superior precision when compared to all other existing eight-node models, and can still provide good and stable results even when extremely coarse and distorted meshes are used. They can also effectively solve the edge effect by accurately capturing the peak value and the dramatical variations of resultants near the SS1 and free boundaries. The proposed eight-node models possess potential in engineering applications and can be easily integrated into commercial software.

This work presents a new scheme, which can take the advantages of both analytical and discrete methods, to develop high-order mesh distortion-resistant Mindlin–Reissner plate-bending elements.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of a firm’s pension insurance contributions (PIC) on its financialization (investment in risky assets) using a sample of Chinese firms.

The authors use a multiple regression model to conduct the analysis.

The findings suggest that a firm’s PIC increases its financialization. Additional analysis suggests that firms with higher PIC are more likely to have lower operating profit and higher financial risk. In addition, the impact of PIC on financialization is more salient when a firm faces high industry competitiveness, holds more cash, has high labor costs and labor intensity or is non-state owned.

The paper adds to the growing literature on the effect of social insurance on corporate policies. The findings complement those related to the relationship between defined contributions and defined benefits retirement plans and corporate policies.

The study contributes to the debate on the merits of financialization. The literature is mixed on the pros and cons of financialization. The results suggest that financialization has an adverse effect on a firm’s performance and risk in the lens of increased PIC.

China has seen a trend of financialization arising from the rapid economic development in the past decade. Moreover, the PIC premiums in China are not trivial. Thus, the significant cost of PIC and the financialization trend suggest that the answer to the research question is timely and meaningful.

This exploratory study aims to investigate the use of Facebook as a dialogic accounting tool for promoting citizen engagement in Italian regions.

This study adopts a mixed methodology. Indeed, it first collects some quantitative data to construct an engagement index for the Facebook pages of the Italian regions, and then it performs a content analysis of some posts while also examining the tenor of the related comments and the level of interaction between regions and citizens.

The Italian regions have mainly used their Facebook pages for public communication purposes rather than for public participation. Therefore, they have conceived social pages more as an instrument of self-legitimisation and thus monologic accounting and have rarely considered them as a tool for engaging citizens who, in turn, showed low interest in participating in online debates. Nature and environment, tourism promotion and sport were the most engaging content types. Findings also confirm that posting many messages does not automatically increase engagement.

This study is one of the first to investigate the potential of social media from a dialogic accounting perspective, especially in the public sector. Additionally, it focuses on regions which are understudied in the literature, although they are critical actors in implementing public policies. Last but not least, this study offers a framework that integrates the literature on the use of social media for citizen engagement and research on such platforms as dialogic accounting tools.

The purpose of this paper is to compute the stress intensity factors (SIFs) of single edge interface crack for arbitrary material combinations and various relative crack lengths, and compare with those for the bonded plates subjected to tensile loading conditions. It aims to discuss the results of the shallow edge interface crack on the basis of the singular stress near the free‐edge corner without the crack.

In this study, the SIFs of interface crack in dissimilar bonded plates subjected to bending loading conditions are analyzed by the finite element method and a post‐processing technique. The use of post‐processing technique of extrapolation reduces the computational cost and improves the accuracy of the obtained result.

The empirical expressions are proposed for evaluating the SIFs of arbitrary material combinations.

Empirical functions can be used to obtain the SIFs for arbitrary material combinations for the bending loading conditions easily. It is very convenient for engineering application.

This study aims to provide the current and future state of United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the higher education institutions (HEIs). Since the SDGs’ proliferation, HEIs have played a crucial part in meeting the goals. Despite the central role of HEIs in accomplishing the SDGs, there has been little attention in providing a comprehensive overview of the SDGs in relation to HEIs.

A total of 280 publications in the Web of Science database were analyzed through a bibliometric approach consisting of citation analysis, co-citation analysis and co-occurrence of keywords analysis. This review explores the current state of SDGs, its central themes of research streams and predicts future direction in the context of HEIs.

The findings would assist stakeholders to strategize the SDGs on HEIs, including the government and policymakers, university top management, benefactors and academics. Three main research streams were observed sustainable curriculum; challenges and barriers of SDGs; and COVID-19 and health management.

Implications suggest that to achieve the stipulated goals in the SDGs, proper planning and strategy should be aligned proportionate to the national agenda.

This paper presents a novel knowledge structure by mapping the most relevant SDGs in the context of HEIs based on bibliometric analysis.

Social factors can shape economic decisions. Corporate governance (CG) studies and guidelines usually neglect that the chief executive officer (CEO) and board members may be socially tied. This study investigates the effects of social ties between the CEO and board members on earnings management (EM).

The authors run a series of regressions using a sample of Brazilian companies listed on the Brazilian Stock Exchange [B]³ between 2011 and 2017 to assess the effect of the social ties between the CEO and board members on EM using a social ties index. The authors also employ five robustness tests to verify the consistency of results, including alternative proxies of EM and social ties and an estimation using fixed effects.

After developing and computing a social ties index between the CEOs and members of the board of directors (BD) and the fiscal council (FC), the study’s findings indicate that a significant level of social ties between the CEO and BD has a negative impact on EM. However, for FC members, the authors found non-significant results.

Unlike previous studies, the authors built a social tie index (STI) from five elements of social ties assessed in an environment with a two-tier board system. Results show that elements of social interactions and personal relationships can benefit the company, as a CEO's level of social ties with the BD reduces EM practices.

A harvesting robot is developed as part of kiwifruit industry automation in New Zealand. This kiwifruit harvester is currently not economically viable, as it drops and damages too many kiwifruit in the harvesting task due to the positional inaccuracy of the gripper. This is due to the difficulties in measuring the exact effective dimensions of the gripper from the manipulator. The purpose of this study is to obtain the effective gripper dimensions using kinematic calibration procedures.

A setup of a constraint plate with a dial gauge is proposed to acquire the calibration data. The constraint plate is positioned above the robot. The data is obtained by using a dial gauge and a permanent marker. The effective dimensions of the gripper are used as error parameters in the calibration process. Calibration is exercised by minimizing the difference between target positions and measured positions iteratively.

The robot with the obtained effective dimensions is tested in the field. It is found that the fruit drops due to positional inaccuracy of the gripper are greatly reduced after calibration.

The kiwifruit industry in New Zealand is growing rapidly and announced plans in 2017 to double global sales by 2025. This growth will put extra pressure on the labour supply for harvesting. Furthermore, the Covid pandemic and resulting border restrictions have dramatically reduced seasonal imported labour availability. A robotic system is a potential solution to address the labour shortages for harvesting kiwifruit.

For kiwifruit harvesting, the picking envelope is well above the robot; the experimental data points obtained by placing a constraint plate above the robot are at similar positions to the target positions of kiwifruit. Using this set of data points for calibration yields a good effect of obtaining the effective dimension of the gripper, which reduces the positional inaccuracy as shown in the field test results.

Gradient coils designed by conventional target field methods usually have a complex physical structure and these methods are not convergent for complex routing area problems. This study aims to design a multi-coil (MC) gradient system arranged on a complex routing area including two cylindrical surfaces with different radii for a head magnetic resonance imaging scanner.

A MC system model is established. In this model, the sub-coils are evenly distributed on two cylindrical wiring surfaces, and the radii of coils are the same on one cylindrical surface. With the target magnetic field set, the currents in every individual coil are solved by constrained least-squares fitting based on the Levenberg–Marquardt method.

The magnetic field nonlinearity generated by designed coils is validated as 4.50% and 3.57% for X-gradient coil and Z-gradient coil, respectively, which satisfy the mainstream nonlinearity standards. The analysis of the optimization results indicates that hardware requirements can be considerably reduced by connecting coils with the same currents in series.

High-linearity gradient magnetic fields are generated on complex routing areas by adopting the MC structure. In addition, the requirements for current sources and amplifiers are considerably reduced.