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This case reviews the development of Dianping. After seeing Zagat's unique business model in the United States, founder Zhang Tao found that he could bring it to China and bring about local innovation. At the beginning of its establishment, the collection and promotion of comment content was the major challenge for Dianping. At the same time, Dianping faced legal issues. To solve these problems, the review mechanism of Dianping was designed to a certain extent to ensure the fairness of the review. With the advent of the mobile Internet era, Dianping began to develop a new business model. Relying on its high-quality “word-of-mouth” content and mass basis, Dianping launched group buying, online restaurant ordering, and other businesses. Dianping has always been open to strategic partners. Since 2015, Dianping has undergone historical changes, merging with Meituan. Since then, Dianping has continuously adjusted its business and organizational structure to maintain its competitiveness. Gradually, Dianping has changed from an independent business entity into a business unit of Meituan.

Magnetic fluid has excellent function used as lubricants in bearings and mechanical seals, and the purpose of this study is to investigate the sealing performance in a spiral groove mechanical seal lubricated by magnetic fluid.

The sealing characteristic parameters of the lubricating film between the end faces of two sealing rings were calculated based on the Muijderman narrow groove theory for a spiral groove mechanical seal lubricated by magnetic fluid. The film thickness was determined according to the balanced forces on the rotating ring, and the effects of operating conditions, intensity of the magnetic field and diameter of nanoparticles on the sealing characteristics were investigated.

It has been found that the intensity of magnetic field has a great effect on the viscosity of magnetic fluid, film thickness and friction torque while has a little effect on the mass flux of magnetic fluid. The film thickness, mass flux of magnetic fluid and friction torque increase with the increasing volume fraction, rotating speed and diameter of magnetic nanoparticles in magnetic fluid. The mass flux of magnetic fluid decrease with the increasing closing force, and the friction torque decreases with the increase of media pressure.

The change of intensity of magnetic field can affect the viscosity of magnetic fluid and then changes the sealing performance in a mechanical seal lubricated by magnetic fluid. To reduce the mass flux of magnetic fluid and friction torque, the volume fraction, diameter of solid magnetic particles and film thickness should be 5%–7%, 8–10 nm and 2–9.3 µm, respectively.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/ILT-02-2023-0032/

Based on the dynamic capabilities view, the current study aims to empirically investigate the effects of organizational learning culture (OLC), strategic reconfiguration (SREC) and digital transformation (DT), altogether, on Egyptian private hospitals' strategic renewal in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study adopted a cross-sectional design to collect the data used to carry out mediation analysis. A self-administered questionnaire was used to collect data from a sample consisted of 264 Egyptian private hospitals. The smart partial least square structural equation modeling technique (PLS-SEM) was adopted to test the hypotheses.

The results demonstrate that OLC directly and positively affects SR. Besides, SREC and DT partially and serially mediate the OLC-SR relationship.

The sample size was small, covering only Egyptian private hospitals. The results may be different in the manufacturing sector and in other countries. The study was cross-sectional which is limited to trace long-term effects of OLC, SREC and DT on SR. Accordingly, a longitudinal study may be undertaken.

Private hospitals' managers must actively explore and dig out valuable resources in order to discover potential information and trends endeavor to redesign internal structures, and reconfigure their current resources, structures and strategies to achieve strategic renewal. The findings also provide new insights to mangers of private sectors' institutions and direct their attention toward adopting the strategic renewal option to survive amidst crises instead of retrenchment, persevering, or quitting business.

The study's results imply that health care providers have sought to improve the capacities of their health care systems to address the patient-level social needs through continuous learning, internal reconfigurations and the transformation toward digitalization to renew their services.

This study therefore contributes to SR literature by being the first empirical study to introduce an integrative model for the antecedents of SR amidst the pandemic.

This paper aims to show the pragmatic studies that examine whether novel COVID-19 affects the national and international stock markets and reinforces the existing literature by highlighting the factors that are resultant from COVID 19.

The systematic literature review and bibliometric approach have been used in the study covering 585 selected articles published in journals of high repute from January 2020 to January 2022. The process of bibliometric analysis has been divided into three stages, namely, assembling, arranging and assessing. From the Scopus database, one of the most reliable and authentic database total of 585 records were collected, out of which 12 were specifically focused on communities, and information gathered in the comma-separated value documents design was compared and interpreted based on year, document types, subject area, country and research fields with the help of graphs and pie charts. The study has analyzed fact-based and reliable studies to draw inferences from existing literature regarding the pandemic impacting the financial markets. In the extant study, an attempt has been made to explore the factors that are resultant from the COVID-19 pandemic and affects the stock market performance, which can be further classified into a few common factors by using factor analysis.

It originated from the majority of the studies that the stock market retorted destructively to the upsurge in the figure of COVID-19 cases and fatalities. It also emphasized that the market has reacted differently in comparison to earlier catastrophes such as the great depression of 2008 and the Spanish flu. Various factors such as fear of losing capital, standstill economy, lower valuation, increased mortality rate, halt in business operations, retrenchment, trade war, liquidity issues, panic buying and selling, digitalization, negative media coverage, government interference, financial behavior of investors, hoarding of COVID supplies, promotion of start-up in health-care and education sector, news bulletins, prevention campaigns, use of medical devices and COVID-19 vaccination, etc. have been conferred from the studies that have an immediate consequence on the actions of investors in the stock market. It was further highlighted in the study that the Indian stock market has been less explored in respect of implications of COVID-19 contagion as the majority of studies were based on either international stock exchanges or combinations of varied nation’s stock markets. It was witnessed in the interpretation section that the number of studies is increasing at a fast pace as new variants of COVID-19 are emerging over time. Significant contribution has been done in enhancing the literature on COVID-19 and the stock market by China and the USA. The maximum contribution in this domain has been done in the form of articles in the present literature. Few studies were focusing on communities, so the present study will try to fill this research gap to some extent.

This conceptual paper is demarcated by unsatisfactory analyses of writings from multi-discipline to get a comprehensive scope of notional understanding. Furthermore, there is a perchance that some other imperative phenomena or variables that prejudiced trading bustle have not been captured by present reviews of research papers. The influences of other macroeconomic variables should be explored to understand the concrete results of this pandemic.

Most of the studies were based on foreign stock exchanges, so there is an opportunity to explore the Indian stock market concerning the implications of the coronavirus pandemic. In the literature, it was examined that short-term studies have been undertaken, which cannot determine the long-term implications of COVID-19. Over time, besides COVID-19, various other factors have started impacting the stock market, so it has become difficult to examine the influence of COVID-19 on the stock market in isolation.

The study will be helpful for future learnings in the arena of the stock market as it provides vast exposure to the present literature related to the impact of COVID-19 on economic markets. On the other hand, investors will also become aware of factors that are resultant of COVID-19 and will take the right decisions to save their investments in light of pandemic implications. The extensive review of studies will also help enterprising communities to take judicial steps to remain active in the period of economic slowdown.

The paper provides significant implications to the investors in the stock market, and it will provide useful insight to improve their returns on their portfolios. The learning from the study will help investors to take fruitful decisions considering the uncertainty during the pandemic period. The inferences drawn from rich existing literature will be guiding enterprises to take timely actions to avoid the situation of loss in the market and adapt new models to ensure continuity of business operations. Different markets had reacted differently, so investors need to be cautious before taking trading decisions.

This study examines how informal business networks achieve marketing goals in socially uncertain contexts. Drawing from multiple historical sources, Shangbangs, a type of business network that thrived in pre-1949 China, are analyzed.

The Critical Historical Research Method (CHRM) undergirds a study of Shangbangs’ historicity (i.e. their socio-historically embedded multiplicity, including organizational forms, activities and connotations.

As informal regional, professional, project-based, special-product-based or mixed marketing networks, Shangbangs relied on “flexible specialization” and coupled multiple business needs to market goods and services, business organizations, specific social values and, when necessary, to debrand business rivals.

This analysis extends theories about marketing networks by probing their subtypes, diverse marketing activities, multipronged channels and relationship building with social entities (including underground societies, business associations and guilds) in response to pre-1949 China’s market uncertainties. Substantiating an alternative approach to “flexible specialization” and marketing innovations within the pre-1949 Chinese economy shows how a parallel theoretical framework can complement western-based marketing theories.

This first comprehensive analysis of Shangbangs, an innovative historical Chinese marketing network outside the conventional market-corporate dichotomy, can inform theory building for marketing strategy-making and management conditioned by social contexts.

This paper aims to analyse residents’ perceptions of tourism growth in Porto prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, aiming to determine the most appropriate strategies to mitigate negative tourism impacts. Studies on resident perceptions of tourism impacts are still scarce, particularly the ones addressing the topic in the context of Portuguese urban tourism areas.

Data was collected through an online survey, focusing on three categories of impacts: (i) economic, (ii) sociocultural (iii) and spatial-environmental, and the respective mitigation strategies, analysed from the perspective of Porto’s residents. Descriptive and bivariate statistics – T-test and Eta correlation – were used to analyse the collected data.

Respondents who live in the city centre experience specific tourism impacts more negatively, when compared to those living outside the inner-city area. Furthermore, no strong correlation is found between the said impacts and the respective mitigation strategies. However, creating awareness among tourists about acceptable behaviour in shared spaces is the strategy that stands out, as it has a medium correlation with all three impact categories. Most impact-strategy associations are weak, meaning that the defined strategies are not the most case-appropriate, which is something that policymakers should address.

To the best of the author’s/authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to adopt this approach in tackling the negative impacts of rapid tourism growth in Porto.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical historical analysis of the business (mis)behaviors and influencing factors that discourage enduring cooperation between principals and agents, to introduce strategies that embrace the social values, economic motivation and institutional designs historically adopted to curtail dishonest acts in international business and to inform an improved principal–agent theory that reflects principal–agent reciprocity as shaped by social, political, cultural, economic, strategic and ideological forces

The critical historical research method is used to analyze Chinese compradors and the foreign companies they served in pre-1949 China.

Business practitioners can extend orthodox principal–agent theory by scrutinizing the complex interactions between local agents and foreign companies. Instead of agents pursuing their economic interests exclusively, as posited by principal–agent theory, they also may pursue principal-shared interests (as suggested by stewardship theory) because of social norms and cultural values that can affect business-related choices and the social bonds built between principals and agents.

The behaviors of compradors and foreign companies in pre-1949 China suggest international business practices for shaping social bonds between principals and agents and foreign principals’ creative efforts to enhance shared interests with local agents.

Understanding principal–agent theory’s limitations can help international management scholars and practitioners mitigate transaction partners’ dishonest acts.

A critical historical analysis of intermediary businesspeople’s (mis)behavior in pre-1949 (1840–1949) China can inform the generalizability of principal–agent theory and contemporary business strategies for minimizing agents’ dishonest acts.

Business incubators are advantageous to new venture legitimacy because they provide rich access to entrepreneurial resources, and their incubation networks can offer endorsement to incubatees. However, empirical evidence on this topic is limited, and the existing literature relies predominantly on the Western context. Given that not all developing country incubators have resourceful and reputable external entrepreneurial networks as in the industrialized countries, and that new ventures need to build legitimacy along cognitive and socio-political dimensions that require different actions to influence different stakeholders, this study investigates empirically how business incubators facilitate their incubatees to build legitimacy in a context where resource and reputation conditions are weak. The purpose of this paper is to clarify how business incubators perform legitimacy-building roles effectively.

A multiple case study of business incubators in Chongqing, a second-tier Chinese city, is presented. Using grounded theory, this paper draws its findings from a synthesis of interviews and secondary data of seven incubators and their ten incubatees.

The legitimacy-building role of business incubators is performed well in this research context. Evidence is presented that incubators play different roles in building different dimensions of incubatees’ legitimacy. Government-associated incubators play a salient role in building incubatees’ socio-political legitimacy whilst non-government related incubators shape their incubatees’ cognitive legitimacy.

This study contributes to the business incubators literature by revealing how incubators perform the legitimacy-building role when their resource endorsement is weak. The results suggest that incubators need to strengthen their ties with external stakeholders and that new ventures need to take key stakeholders into consideration when they select incubators to enter.

Learning from safety accidents and sharing safety knowledge has become an important part of accident prevention and improving construction safety management. Considering the difficulty of reusing unstructured data in the construction industry, the knowledge in it is difficult to be used directly for safety analysis. The purpose of this paper is to explore the construction of construction safety knowledge representation model and safety accident graph through deep learning methods, extract construction safety knowledge entities through BERT-BiLSTM-CRF model and propose a data management model of data–knowledge–services.

The ontology model of knowledge representation of construction safety accidents is constructed by integrating entity relation and logic evolution. Then, the database of safety incidents in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry is established based on the collected construction safety incident reports and related dispute cases. The construction method of construction safety accident knowledge graph is studied, and the precision of BERT-BiLSTM-CRF algorithm in information extraction is verified through comparative experiments. Finally, a safety accident report is used as an example to construct the AEC domain construction safety accident knowledge graph (AEC-KG), which provides visual query knowledge service and verifies the operability of knowledge management.

The experimental results show that the combined BERT-BiLSTM-CRF algorithm has a precision of 84.52%, a recall of 92.35%, and an F1 value of 88.26% in named entity recognition from the AEC domain database. The construction safety knowledge representation model and safety incident knowledge graph realize knowledge visualization.

The proposed framework provides a new knowledge management approach to improve the safety management of practitioners and also enriches the application scenarios of knowledge graph. On the one hand, it innovatively proposes a data application method and knowledge management method of safety accident report that integrates entity relationship and matter evolution logic. On the other hand, the legal adjudication dimension is innovatively added to the knowledge graph in the construction safety field as the basis for the postincident disposal measures of safety accidents, which provides reference for safety managers' decision-making in all aspects.