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Under uncertain circumstances, digital technologies are taken as digital transformation enablers and driving forces to integrate with medical, healthcare and emergency management research for effective epidemic prevention and control. This study aims to adapt complex systems in emergency management. Thus, a digital transformation-driven and systematic circulation framework is proposed in this study that can utilize the advantages of digital technologies to generate innovative and systematic governance.

Aiming at adapting complex systems in emergency management, a systematic circulation framework based on the interpretive research is proposed in this study that can utilize the advantages of digital technologies to generate innovative and systematic governance. The framework consists of four phases: (1) analysis of emergency management stages, (2) risk identification in the emergency management stages, (3) digital-enabled response model design for emergency management, and (4) strategy generation for digital emergency governance. A case study in China was illustrated in this study.

This paper examines the role those digital technologies can play in responding to pandemics and outlines a framework based on four phases of digital technologies for pandemic responses. After the phase-by-phase analysis, a digital technology-enabled emergency management framework, titled “Expected digital-enabled emergency management framework (EDEM framework)” was adapted and proposed. Moreover, the social risks of emergency management phases are identified. Then, three strategies for emergency governance and digital governance from the three perspectives, namely “Strengthening weaknesses for emergency response,” “Enhancing integration for collaborative governance,” and “Engaging foundations for emergency management” that the government can adopt them in the future, fight for public health emergency events.

The novel digital transformation-driven systematic circulation framework for public health risk response and governance was proposed. Meanwhile, an “Expected digital-enabled emergency management framework (EDEM model)” was also proposed to achieve a more effective empirical response for public health risk response and governance and contribute to studies about the government facing the COVID-19 pandemic effectively.

Using behavioral theory of the firm, the purpose of this paper is to examine how a small firm’s performance relative to historical and social aspirations is related to its international entrepreneurial orientation (IEO). This study also explores two environmental factors, liability of foreignness (LoF) and host-country market potential (HMP), as the moderators for the relationship of performance and IEO.

This study uses survey for data collection from Canadian small firms and employs regression models for data analysis.

The results show that small firms demonstrate stronger IEO when their performance is below aspirations, but their IEO diminishes when their performance exceeds aspirations. The authors also found that a small firm’s LoF does not moderate the impact of its performance feedback on IEO. However, the authors found HMP plays a moderating role when a small firm’s performance is below aspirations.

This study investigates the relationship of IEO to aspiration and found that this relationship is moderated by HMP. The study advances our knowledge on small firms’ international behavior.

This study aims to propose that, in business-to-business (B2B) industries, number of strategic alliances firms established before a “black swan” event enhances their chances to survive the black swan, and the enhancements take place through moderation effects. Changes in firms’ core structures – their stated goals, authority structure, core technologies and marketing strategies – to adapt to business jolts have adverse effects on firm performance. Firms’ existing B2B strategic alliances moderate the effects negatively by outsourcing different goals, authority structures, core technologies and marketing strategies to partners who fit the changed environment.

This study collected quantitative data and analyzed the data with the regression method.

Using data from Chinese firms in five technology industries during the 2007–2009 economic crisis, this study finds that firms’ internal adaptation is negatively correlated with their performance during economic crises, and B2B strategic alliances negatively moderate this relationship.

First, this study focuses on B2B strategic alliances, and it is not clear whether the findings apply to B2C industries, where strategic alliances may not be common. Perhaps firms can use other means of survival in addition to strategic alliances in B2C industries. Second, this study does not differentiate between fast-moving and slow-moving industries, and it is not clear whether strategic alliances play the same role in both industries. Third, this study does not differentiate firm ages and sizes. It remains unclear how large, established and small, young firms differ when facing crises. Finally, this study is based on the Chinese setting, and it is not clear whether the findings apply to other markets as well. These issues should be explored in future studies.

Changing firms’ core structures harms their performance during black swan crises because such crises are unpredictable, and planned changes may not adapt firms to crises. Managers should not attempt to change their core structures during crises. B2B strategic alliances provide an effective means for firms to survive crises.

This paper makes two contributions to the existing literature: First, this paper demonstrates that changes of one of the four core structures of a firm to cope with black swan events have negative impacts on firm performance. Second, this paper identifies the importance of holding a variety of strategic alliances previously to the black swan events to reduce the negative impacts of changing core structures.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the strategic intentions of strategic alliances in technology industries.

This paper mainly uses case studies as its methodology.

This paper depicts how the possibilities of firms sharing resources, costs and risks decrease when industry changes grow frequently and unpredictably. More importantly, this study suggests that in technology industries, firms use strategic alliances to keep their existing marketing strategies intact.

For future studies, the authors will develop and test hypotheses based on the arguments of this paper.

Findings of this paper contradict business executives’ common sense but have important implications for them to manage their strategic alliances.

Findings of this paper contradict the traditional belief of strategic alliances and thus advance the knowledge on strategic alliances.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the excellent practice of public relations concerning strategic internal communication may help empower female employees to cope with workplace gender discrimination. It constructs and empirically tests a theoretical model that investigates the role of transparent internal communication on diversity and inclusion in shaping female employees' sense of empowerment, and that empowerment may affect how they cope with such problems in the workplace.

An online survey was conducted with 402 full-time female employees in large-sized organizations in the United States. Structural equation models were conducted to test the proposed measurement model and hypothesized model.

The findings of this study offer support for the proposed model that featuring transparent internal communication regarding workplace gender discrimination increases female employees' empowerment to tackle the problems, which in turn encourages them to adopt problem-focused coping and participate in collective coping behaviors.

Excellent internal communication not only facilitates organization-employee relationships as prior research widely demonstrated, but, according to the findings of this study, also creates a sense of empowerment among female employees, which encourage them to proactively address workplace gender discrimination issue.

Organizations should practice transparent communication regarding diversity and inclusion, ensuring employees receive sufficient information, clear guidelines, and opportunities to voice as well as aim to develop empowerment interventions that help employees address discrimination issues in the workplace.

To the best of the author's knowledge, this study is among the first empirical studies that present the importance of strategic internal communication, particularly transparent communication, in facilitating gender equality in the workplace.

This study aims to examine how demographic and psychological predictors of free and paid vaccine acceptance operate within an infectious environment. The psychological predictors were derived from the protection motivation theory (PMT), including the appraised effectiveness of vaccine in containing the pandemic and the fear of COVID-19.

A representative data set that consists of responses from 2,850 Malaysians was used in this study. Multi-level modelling was used to analyse the data.

Results indicated that the acceptance of free and paid vaccination did not differ by region. This suggests that the effects of the included psychological predictors on vaccine acceptance are independent from the environment. Malaysians are more likely to endorse both free and paid vaccination when it is perceived as effective in controlling the pandemic. When the vaccine is deemed as an effective preventive of COVID-19, Malaysians tend to seek free vaccination. Although fear of COVID-19 did significantly predict the endorsement of vaccination, it is a weaker predictor than the perceived effectiveness of vaccine.

This research used a large representative data set and the PMT framework in addressing vaccine acceptance in Malaysia.

This paper aims to introduce a systematic computing and analytical procedure that is applied to the co-author network to identify the temporal evolution and growth of research collaborations in the area of e-governance. The empirical analysis of the temporal co-author network can trace the emerging authors and knowledge bursts over time.

The study applied social network theory to trace the author collaboration patterns in the domain of e-governance. Analysis of the co-author network using micro and macro parameters was done to trace the temporal evolution of the author collaborations.

E-governance is a multi-disciplinary research domain split over streams of management, politics, information technology and electronics. Hence, research collaborations play a significant role in its advancement. The knowledge sharing between individual authors, institutions and groups through research collaborations, resulting in extensive sharing of data, equipment and research methods, has boosted research activities and development in e-governance. In this paper, the authors systematically analyse the current scenario of research collaborations in the area of e-governance using co-author network to estimate its impact on the advancement of the field. The authors also analysed the temporal evolution of the co-author networks, which show remarkable growth of research collaborations in the domain of e-governance from the year 2000.

The co-author network analysis is only a proxy measure for the analysis of research collaborations. The names of the authors and the university affiliations used in the article are as retrieved from the research repository of Scopus. The degree, citations and other parameters related with authors have scope only within the environment of the co-author network used in the analysis. The criteria used in the study is limited to the degree of research collaborations and the number of co-authored publications in the giant component of the co-author network.

Institutions, authors and governments can trace and select suitable topics and choose research groups of co-authors over the world for future research collaborations in e-governance. The knowledge about the emerging and most discussed topics gives an overview of the global research trends of e-governance.

The study identified the evolution of creative collaborations in e-governance in the global perspective. The methodology introduced here is helpful to detect the proficient and productive author collaborations and the spectrum of related e-governance research topics associated with them. As the author collaborations can be mapped to the institutional and country-level collaborations, the information is helpful for researchers, institutions and governments to establish the best collaborations in e-governance research based on the author proficiency, collaboration patterns and research topics as per the requirements.

The paper introduces a novel research methodology using temporal analysis of co-author network to identify the evolution of research patterns and the associated research topics.

Much of the extant evidence in the marketing literature posits that firms use strategic alliances to share resources, costs and risks as paths to performance improvements. Drawing from the organizational ecology theory, this study aims to propose a different rationale, namely, that strategic alliances protect a firm’s core structure – its stated goals, authority structure, core technologies and marketing strategies – by mitigating the need for hazardous changes in hostile environments.

This study collected quantitative data using market survey and analyzed the data with the regression method.

Using Chinese firms in three technology industries as the research setting, this research finds a positive and significant relationship between environmental hostility and core structure dynamism. Although strategic alliances themselves have no direct bearing on core structure dynamism, they are found to moderate this relationship negatively, that is, strategic alliances attenuate the relationship between environmental hostility and structural changes.

This paper argues that strategic alliances have significant moderating effects on firm performance, that is, firms use strategic alliances to outsource competence to partners and, thus, avoid internal turmoil. However, the moderating effect alone cannot explain the complexity of strategic alliances. There could exist other effects that remain unknown. In addition, individual-level factors could have significant impacts on strategic alliance management. Future studies should look into these issues to advance the authors’ knowledge on strategic alliances.

The findings of this study show that managers should outsource competence to partners when they experience turmoil in markets. Adapting to market turmoil internally could lead to market failure.

This study provides a new rationale for strategic alliances, that is, firms use strategic alliances to reduce market uncertainty. This rationale has not been reported in the existing literature.

The purpose of this paper is to differentiate between intra- and inter-regional diversification and explore how each affects firm performance. Existing studies show that both intra- and inter-regional expansion provide benefits and incur costs but the findings are mixed. This study aims to explain the mixed findings.

This study uses secondary data and quantitative methodologies to test hypotheses.

Using data from 663 Canadian firms over a six-year period (2006–2011), the authors find that the relationship between firm performance and the depth and width of intra-regional expansion is nonlinear. The authors also find a sigmoid-shaped relationship between firm performance and inter-regional diversification, i.e., performance initially increases with home regional diversification, decreases with bi-regional diversification and finally increases again with multi-regional diversification.

The findings of this study shed light on the current debate on the merits of inter- and intra-regional diversification and have important theoretical and managerial implications.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of expatriate’s social capital and knowledge sharing on multinational companies’ (MNCs) financial performance, with a specific focus on the influence of trust, commitment, organizational support and the four elements of balanced scorecard (BSC).

A quantitative questionnaire survey was conducted using expatriates of MNCs in Taiwan as the respondents.

Trust and organizational support are significant predictors of knowledge sharing and social capital, which further facilitate their influence on learning and growth, customer satisfaction, internal process improvement and financial performance of MNCs. Besides, social capital serves as an accelerate agent to promote the influence of trust on knowledge sharing, and customer satisfaction serves as a catalyst on the influence of learning and growth and internal process on a firms’ financial performance.

This study provides a clear articulation of the role of knowledge sharing on the financial performance and its moderation effect on the elements of BSC. Trust and organizational support are essential for knowledge sharing and expatriates’ social capital. The roles of social capital and knowledge sharing are critical for expatriates to be success in the overseas market places.

Since the evidences regarding expatriate performance rarely integrate the variables of social capital, knowledge sharing and BSC into a more comprehensive framework, the results of this study can be an important reference for academicians to do further validation. These results are also critical for practitioners to develop dispatching policies for the expatriates in the oversea market places.