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Political risk has been identified as a major impediment to the success of foreign invested projects, in developing countries. Infrastructure projects are especially sensitive to host-country political climates. Governance in emerging economies can be unstable, which adversely impacts infrastructure projects, given their high capital-intensity, long operational periods and high asset specificity. While the detrimental impact of political risk is well documented, the mitigation of such impacts on infrastructure projects remains largely unexamined. This study, therefore, addresses this by exploring the available identified political risk management (PRM) strategies based on resilience theory and evaluating their effectiveness.

A mixed-method approach was employed to identify PRM strategies. Firstly, a comprehensive literature review identified 40 potential PRM strategies. However, the applicability of those 40 strategies was uncertain due to the scarcity of PRM studies. Thus, expert interviews, drawing on the insights of Chinese infrastructure industry professionals with experience in FII, were applied to review the identified strategies. This process reduced the pool of applicable strategies to 34. Subsequently, 356 questionnaires were sent out to investors from China, Australia and Singapore, with 218 valid responses returned. Based on the data collected from the surveys, statistical analysis was used to evaluate and classify applicable PRM strategies.

Results reveal the most effective top five strategies for offsetting the detrimental effects of political risk on foreign infrastructure investment to be: (1) selection of suitable markets and projects; (2) maintaining good relationship with government; (3) purchasing political insurance; (4) utilizing capable contractors from both host country and home country; and (5) adopting an appropriate entry mode. The 34 strategies were further consolidated into four meta-strategies through factor analysis, resulting in the formulation of a strategy selection matrix.

The findings of this study offer a rational means by which infrastructure investment practitioners considering projects in developing countries, may arrive at an optimal political risk mitigation strategy. The findings also offer government of host countries directives to improving the political environment in order to attract foreign investment flows into local infrastructure projects.

Nowadays, star athletes are global brand personalities. The increased popularity of the professional sport has contributed to elevating exceptional athletes to international star status. This empirical study aims to assess the impact of athlete performance and brand social value on product involvement with the mediation effect of celebrity athlete endorsement.

A quantitative survey was conducted with 399 Chinese participants. PLS-SEM is adopted to examine the associated paths and the mediating effect of celebrity endorsement.

The results demonstrate the significant impact of athlete performance and brand social value on product involvement. Celebrity endorsement partially mediates the effects of athlete performance and brand social value on product involvement.

This study extends understanding of celebrity athlete endorsement and provides insight into the strategic implications for Chinese social media-based marketing initiatives in the context of the recent Olympic Game in Tokyo 2021.

The objectives of this paper are to examine the impact of psychological contract on project performance in private construction projects and to investigate if the positive effect of psychological contract on project performance can be mediated by inter-organisational teamwork.

Multiple regression analysis and mediation analysis were applied in this study to conduct the proposed hypotheses. Data were collected via questionnaire surveys from the construction professionals working for contractor firms on private construction projects.

The result of the multiple regression analysis indicated that psychological contract between contractors and owners is significantly related with project performance in construction projects. This study examined five psychological contract components, but the most important element was found as trust which can influence every aspect of project performance. Fairness is another key factor that can improve project performance in terms of budget and quality. Further, the findings of the mediation analysis revealed that inter-organisational teamwork has a mediating effect on the relationship between psychological contract and project performance.

This paper presents the important role of psychological contract between contractor and owner organizations in construction projects that can affect project performance. The study also highlights the significance of inter-organisational teamwork as a mediator to the relationship between psychological contract and project performance.

Employees' personal Internet usage (PIU) has become increasingly common at work. It is important for both researchers and managers to understand how PIU affects employee creative performance. This study aims to examine what kind of PIU is likely to increase or decrease employee creative performance and why. The authors also examine a potential boundary condition for the effect of PIU on employee creative performance.

Based on conservation of resource (COR) theory and broaden and build theory, the authors investigated the impact of two types of PIU, namely within-task PIU and between-task PIU, on the creative performance of knowledge workers. The authors conducted a daily diary study and surveyed 107 knowledge workers in China over 10 consecutive working days (n = 1,070) to test the model.

The authors find that within-task PIU reduces knowledge workers' creative performance by decreasing the workers' positive emotion, whereas between-task PIU promotes the performance by increasing positive emotion. The above relationships become stronger when knowledge workers perceive a higher level of organisational support.

The authors' study makes theoretical contributions by advancing researchers' understanding of the situations in which PIU may decrease or increase employee creative performance. The findings are also useful for developing organisational policies to take advantage of the positive side of PIU whilst avoiding PIU's negative side.

In the digital age, the spread of online behavior and real-world information leads to social contagion. This study aims to investigate the contagion phenomenon of online physician choice and then discuss its potential influence on the sub-specialization process in the healthcare service industry. In specific, this study aims to propose the basic mechanism of infection and immunity as follows – exposure to antigen may lead to an immune response, and the success of the immune response may depend on the provision of appropriate immune signaling.

Data collected from haodf.com including 4 disease types and 247 physicians from 2008 to 2015 were used to test the proposed hypotheses. Panel vector autoregression method was utilized to analyze the panel data.

The obtained result shows that social contagion of physician choice over disease type is salient on e-consultation platforms, indicating that physicians associated with/on haodf.com are concentrating on an even narrower type of disease. Disclosing more simple signals (physician history orders) results in more disease concentration for that physician in the future. In contrast, disclosing more detailed signals (physician-contributed knowledge or physician reviews) leads to less disease concentration.

This finding implies that physician-contributed knowledge and physician reviews may act as immune signal which will tend to trigger a success immune response. This study not only suggests managers should be careful about the double-edged sword effect of online physician choice contagion but also provides the useful approaches to promote or restrain such a contagion in a flexible way.

In light of the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) theoretical paradigm, this paper explores how information relevance and media richness affect social network exhaustion and, moreover, how social network exhaustion ultimately leads to health anxiety and COVID-19-related stress.

The conceptual model is explicitly analyzed and estimated by using data from 309 individuals of different ages in mainland China. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM) were utilized to validate the proposed hypotheses through the use of online data.

The findings suggest that information relevance is negatively associated with social network exhaustion. In addition, social network exhaustion is a significant predictor of health anxiety and stress. Furthermore, information relevance and media richness can indirectly influence health anxiety and stress through the mediating effect of social network exhaustion.

Theoretically, this paper verifies the causes and consequences of social network exhaustion during COVID-19, thus making a significant contribution to the theoretical construction and refinement of this emerging research area. Practically, the conceptual research model in this paper may provide inspiration for more investigators and scholars who are inclined to further explore the different dimensions of social network exhaustion by utilizing other variables.

Although social network exhaustion and its adverse consequences have become prevalent, relatively few empirical studies have addressed the deleterious effects of social network exhaustion on mobile social media users’ psychosocial well-being and mental health during the prolonged COVID-19. These findings have important theoretical and practical implications for the rational development and construction of mobile social technologies to cultivate proper health awareness and mindset during the ongoing worldwide COVID-19 epidemic.

Safety climate plays an important role in the high-risk construction industry. Advances have been made in the understanding of construction safety climate in terms of four interrelated themes, specifically, its definition, measurement, antecedents and consequences. However, knowledge remains fragmented as the studies are scattered, and a systematic review covering these four themes is lacking. To address this research gap, this study aims to perform a systematic literature review of construction safety climate literature regarding the four themes.

Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol guidelines, 178 eligible articles were obtained. This study provided thematic analysis of the 178 papers to identify what is known and what is not yet fully known regarding the four themes of construction safety climate. This study also conducted a descriptive analysis to identify the influential scholars, keywords, theories and research methods used by the literature, and finally presented an integrative framework directing future research.

The literature has not reached a consensus on the definition and measurement of construction safety climate. While it has identified the impact of safety climate on both behavioral and accident consequences, it has paid less attention to the antecedents and their underlying mechanisms regarding safety climate. Fang D. and Lingard H. are identified as the most influential authors in this field. “Questionnaire” and “safety behavior” are the keywords most closely related to safety climate. Unfortunately, the existing evidence for the causal relationships between safety climate and its antecedents and consequences is weak, as many studies lack clear theoretical substance, use a concurrent research design and focus only on individual-level climate perceptions. Finally, to support the development of construction safety climate around the four themes, potential research directions and research methods supporting them are illustrated.

This review makes contributions by integrating existing construction studies covering its definition, measurement, antecedents and consequences. This review also makes contributions to specific themes: no review exists on the antecedents of construction safety climate, and this review fills that gap; with regard to consequences, the existing reviews focus either on safety outcomes or safety behavior, but this review included both of them and further elaborated the different theories underpinning the relationships between safety climate and them. It is hoped that this systematic review will be helpful to the research community toward developing a nomologic network and promoting knowledge integration with respect to construction safety climate.

Construction workers’ safety compliance is attracting considerable critical attention as it plays a decisive role in improving safety on construction sites. This study applied the concept of differentiating safety compliance into deep compliance (DC) and surface compliance (SC) and relied on trait activation theory to investigate the effects of situational awareness (SA) and emotional intelligence (EI) on safety compliance.

Cross-sectional survey data were collected from 239 construction workers in Australia, and these responses were statistically analyzed using the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to validate the proposed model.

Results revealed that both EI and SA positively impacted DC and negatively impacted SC. Moreover, SA partially mediated the link between EI and two types of safety compliance (DC and SC). The outcomes showed that construction workers’ ability in regulating their emotions could influence their perception of environmental cues and the effectiveness of safety compliance behavior.

This study sheds light on investigating the antecedents of DC and SC from the perspective of trait activation theory. The findings also have practical implications, stating that construction site managers or safety professionals should consider providing training on construction workers’ EI and SA to enhance their willingness to expend conscious efforts in complying with safety rules and procedures, which can lead to improved safety outcomes.

This study examines the impact of China’s mixed-ownership reform on the innovation of non-state-owned acquirers, with a particular focus on the impact on firms with high financing constraints, low-quality accounting information or less tangible assets.

We use a proprietary dataset of firms listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges to investigate the impact of mixed ownership reform on non-state-owned enterprise (non-SOE) innovation. We employ regression analysis to examine the association between mixed ownership reform and firm innovation.

The study finds that non-state-owned firms can improve innovation by acquiring equity in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) under the reform. Eased financing constraints, lowered financing costs, better access to tax incentives or government subsidies, lowered agency costs, better accounting information quality and more credit loans are underlying the impact. Additionally, cross-ownership connections amongst non-SOE executives and government intervention strengthen the impact, whilst regional marketisation weakens it.

This study adds to the literature on the association between mixed ownership reform and firm innovation by focussing on the conditions under which this impact is stronger. It also sheds light on the policy implications for SOE reforms in emerging economies.

The silicone modifications of two-component epoxy resin coatings are commonly built on epoxy resins rather than on epoxy curing agents. The silicone-modified epoxy curing agent system is rarely reported yet. This study aims to prepare the polysiloxane (PS)-modified waterborne epoxy coatings based on aqueous curing agents technology.

Waterborne epoxy curing agents with different contents of terminal epoxy PS were synthesized by reacting with triethylenetetramine, followed by incorporating of epoxy resin (NPEL-128) and polyethylene glycol diglycidyl ether. The waterborne epoxy coatings were prepared with the above curing agents, and their performance was investigated through thermogravimetric analysis, scanning electron microscopy, mechanical characterization, gloss measurement, chemical resistance test and ultraviolet (UV) aging experiment.

The results showed that the epoxy coating prepared by silicon-modified curing agent has higher gloss, better chemical resistance and UV resistance than the coating from unmodified curing agent with terminal epoxy PS and commercially available waterborne epoxy curing agent (Aradur 3986), as well as the competitive mechanical properties and heat resistance. Reduced water absorption on fibrous paper was also obtained with the help of silicon-modified curing agent.

These findings will be valuable for resin researchers in addressing the modification issues about waterborne epoxy resin and curing agent.