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This paper examines the comparative corporate performance of logistics companies in Korea, China and Japan. Based on the annual data from the listed companies, the growth rate of Chinese companies has surpassed that of Korean and Japanese companies and has labeled China as the fastest growing economy. How ever, labor efficiency of Chinese firms when calculated by total revenue per employee is the lowest of the three countries. In addition, the profitability of Chinese multimodal logistics companies and sea transport companies is also lower than that of Korea and Japan.

Using Data Envelop Analysis(DEA), the primary results regarding corporate efficiency among Korean, Chinese and Japanese logistic companies are as follows: In the multimodal industries, Japanese firms have revealed the highest level of efficiency, with Korean firms coming in second, and Chinese firms ranking third with distinctly inferior performance. This trend has also been examined in the maritime industries, in which the efficiency levels have been deteriorating continuously. However, in the air transportation industry Chinese companies revealed the highest level of efficiency, which resulted from the business characteristics of the government supported conglomerate companies.

The purpose of this paper is to report on research findings from a teaching and learning intervention that explored whether undergraduate university students can be taught to articulate their employability skills effectively to prospective employers and to retain this ability post-course.

The study included 3,400 students in 44 courses at a large Canadian university. Stage 1 involved a course-level teaching and learning intervention with the experimental student group, which received employability skills articulation instruction. Stage 2 involved an online survey administered six months post-course to the experimental group and the control group. Both groups responded to two randomly generated questions using the Situation/Task, Actions, Result (STAR) format, a format that employers commonly rely on to assess job candidates’ employability skills. The researchers compared the survey responses from the experimental and control groups.

Survey results demonstrate that previous exposure to the STAR format was the only significant factor affecting students’ skills articulation ability. Year of study and program (co-operative or non-co-operative) did not influence articulation.

The findings suggest that universities should integrate institution-wide, course-level employability skills articulation assignments for students in all years of study and programs (co-op and non-co-op).

This research is novel because its study design combines practical, instructional design with empirical research of significant scope (institution-wide) and participant size (3,400 students), contributing quantitative evidence to the employability skills articulation discussion. By surveying students six months post-course, the study captures whether articulation instruction can be recalled, an ability of particular relevance for career preparedness.

The purpose of this paper is to bring out the possibility of selecting good leaders in Asian countries, i.e., China and Singapore.

Since comparative historical analysis enhances the objectivity for academic discussion, Deng Xiaoping’s and Lee Kuan Yew’s leadership successions have been chosen as the cases for studies by virtue of “method of agreement”. Incorporating “argument based on the contrary” into the context for macro-historical analysis, this paper characterises the duo’s successful (at least quite successful) leadership successions, thus offering an alternative paradigm beyond Western-style democracy.

Both cases of post-Mao China and the independent Singapore indicate that in quite a number of Asian countries, good leaders could still be selected beyond universal suffrage as practised among Western Electoral Democracies, mainly because of the elites-driven context. As to the duo’s succession results, Deng Xiaoping’s selection of leaders was somewhat successful, while Lee Kuan Yew’s was phenomenal.

This paper offers readers a glance over the possibility of selecting good leaders in Asian countries not fully based on Western-style democracy. Learning from the duo’s leadership successions, the West may treat elite politics as the supplement under Western Electoral Democracies in order to avoid their countries falling into the trap of populism. The West could meanwhile consider the exceptional criteria prized by the duo for leadership successions. Considering such interactions among elites in the real-life context, it could serve as an alternative model to Western-style democracy.

Many additively manufactured parts suffer from reduced interlayer strength. This anisotropy is necessarily tied to the orientation during manufacture. When individual features on a part have conflicting optimal orientations, the part is unavoidably compromised. This paper aims to demonstrate a strategy in which conflicting features can be functionally separated into “co-parts” which are individually aligned in an optimal orientation, selectively reinforced with continuous fiber, printed simultaneously and, finally, assembled into a composite part with substantially improved performance.

Several candidate parts were selected for co-part decomposition. They were printed as standard fused filament fabrication plastic parts, parts reinforced with continuous fiber in one plane and co-part assemblies both with and without continuous fiber reinforcement (CFR). All parts were loaded until failure. Additionally, parts representative of common suboptimally oriented features (“unit tests”) were similarly printed and tested.

CFR delivered substantial improvement over unreinforced plastic-only parts in both standard parts and co-part assemblies, as expected. Reinforced parts held up to 2.5x the ultimate load of equivalent plastic-only parts. The co-part strategy delivered even greater improvement, particularly when also reinforced with continuous fiber. Plastic-only co-part assemblies held up to 3.2x the ultimate load of equivalent plastic only parts. Continuous fiber reinforced co-part assemblies held up to 6.4x the ultimate load of equivalent plastic-only parts. Additionally, the thought process behind general co-part design is explored and a vision of simulation-driven automated co-part implementation is discussed.

This technique is a novel way to overcome one of the most common challenges preventing the functional use of additively manufactured parts. It delivers compelling performance with continuous carbon fiber reinforcement in 3D printed parts. Further study could extend the technique to any anisotropic manufacturing method, additive or otherwise.

Malaysia is considered to be a relatively young country as compared to other older countries such as Japan, China and Australia in terms of the ageing population. However, until 2035, Malaysia will be in the ageing group countries as 15% of the entire population will be above 60 years of age. This situation is quite alarming as more and more ageing care centres will be required to fulfill the ongoing demands of the ageing population. The elderly care centres in Malaysia are categorised as public (sponsored by the government), private, and charity based that comes under religious centres. Currently, there are about 365 registered elderly care centres working in the main states of Malaysia, including Sabah and Sarawak, two states of the East Malaysia. Due to the importance of ageing population issues, the present study is conducted to explore the demographics facet of Malaysian’s elderly care centres. The main reason behind that lies on the fact that many of these centres are still labelled as being not well equipped and lacking behind in trained staff, equipment and also suffering from severe financial constraints but some still capable of working on a sustainability basis.

Qualitative Research Strategy has been adopted, and 28 centres throughout Malaysia are included in this study. About 18 Operators from different centres and 15 caregivers were interviewed to get the holistic view of ageing care and facilities in their respective centres.

The results highlight that the majority of centres are not receiving any financial help from the government, and few centres are doing small business such as supplying consumable medical and non-medical items and providing renting and rehabilitation centres facilities to sustain. The caregivers are facing issues such as excess workload, less salary, peer conflicts and non-cooperative centre leadership.

The present study may help to provide useful information to the policymakers, which enables them to formulate the strategies for ageing care centres in Malaysia. As this study provides insight of components that have an impact on the overall wellbeing of elderly care centres, hence, it could help the care services providers to act as a rising star for Malaysian’s social life comfort.

Much has been speculated about the role that Generation Z will play in achieving more sustainable development. The tourism sector gains a special role in this discussion. On the one hand, tourism, due to its growing importance, has had a significant impact on environmental sustainability. On the other hand, Generation Z will be the largest group of travellers ever in the future. In this context, the objective of the present study is to explore the interest of young Portuguese generation Z in sustainable development goals (SDGs), tourism sustainability (TS) and their pro-environmental habits and how these categories influence the choice of sustainable tourism destination.

An online questionnaire was used to collect data from a sample of 305 young Portuguese. The quantitative analysis was performed with the application of the partial least square (PLS) model.

Overall, the authors found that despite our respondents showing an interest in the SDGs the same interest is not true for tourism. Although most respondents are concerned about choosing a sustainable destination, they do not care about keeping destinations sustainable, nor do they have pro-environmental habits.

This study presents the first evidence of the attitudes, beliefs and pro-environmental habits of Portuguese Gen Zers and their potential contribution to TS.

The aim of this study is to empirically explore and analyze the concrete tasks of output measurement and the inherent challenges related to these tasks in a traditional and autonomous professional public work setting – the judicial system.

The analysis of the tasks is based on a categorization of general performance measurement motives (control-motivate-learn) and main stakeholder levels (society-organization-professionals). The analysis is exploratory and conducted as an empirical content analysis on materials and reports produced in two performance improvement projects conducted in European justice organizations.

The identified main tasks in the different categories are related to managing resources, controlling performance deviations, and encouraging improvement and development of performance. Based on the results, key improvement areas connected to output measurement in professional public organizations are connected to the improvement of objectivity and fairness in budgeting and work allocation practices, improvement of output measures' versatility and informativeness to highlight motivational and learning purposes, improvement of professional self-management in setting output targets and producing outputs, as well as improvement of organizational learning from the output measurement.

The paper presents empirically founded practical examples of challenges and improvement opportunities related to the tasks of output measurement in professional public organization.

This paper fulfils an identified need to study how general performance management motives realize as concrete tasks of output measurement in justice organizations.

Sustainable building design suffers from a lack of reliable life cycle data. The purpose of this paper is to compare life cycle costs of sustainable building projects, examine the magnitude of various cost drivers and discuss the implications of an emerging shift in cost drivers.

This paper is based on data from 21 office buildings certified in Denmark according to the sustainable certification scheme DGNB.

The paper supports previous findings that construction costs and running costs each roughly make up half of the life cycle costs over a 50-year period. More surprising is the finding that the life cycle costs for cleaning are approximately twice as high as the supply costs for energy and water.

The data set is based on actual construction costs of office buildings constructed in 2013-2017. Although all running costs are calculated rather than measured, they are based on a more detailed, specific and industry-supported set of calculation assumptions than is usual for life cycle costing studies because of extensive collaborative work in a number of concomitant national research and development projects.

Authorities, clients and building professionals heavily emphasise energy-saving measures in new Danish buildings. The paper suggests redirecting this effort towards other more prominent cost drivers like cleaning and technical installations.

This paper provides a notable contribution to the academic understanding of the significance of different cost drivers as well as the practical implementation of life cycle costing.

The purpose of this study is to apply a corpus-assisted analysis of keywords and their collocations in the US presidential discourse from Clinton to Trump to discover the meanings of these words and the collocates they have. Keywords are salient words in a corpus whose frequency is unusually high (positive keywords) or low (negative keywords) in comparison with a reference corpus. Collocation is the co-occurrence of words.

To achieve this purpose, the investigation of keywords and collocations is generated by AntConc, a corpus processing software.

This analysis leads to shed light on the similarities and/or differences amongst the past four American presidents concerning their key topics. Keyword analysis through keyness makes it evident that Clinton and Obama, being Democrats, demonstrate a clear tendency to improve Americans’ life inside their social sphere. Obama surpasses Clinton as regard foreign affairs. Clinton and Obama’s infrequent subjects have to do with terrorism and immigration. This complies with their condensed focus on social and economic improvements. Bush, a republican, concentrates only on external issues. This is proven by his keywords signifying war against terrorism. Bush’s negative use of words marking cooperative actions conforms to his positive use of words indicating external war. Trump’s positive keywords are about exaggerated descriptions without a defined target. He also shows an unusual frequency in referring to his name and position. His words used with negative keyness refer to reforming programs and external issues. Collocations around each top content keyword clarify the word and harmonize with the presidential orientation negotiated by the keywords.

Limitations have to do with the issue of the accurate representation of the samples.

This research is original in its methodology of applying corpus linguistics tools in the analysis of presidential discourses.

With the proliferation of international education initiatives, research into the transfer of pedagogy across cultures is essential to ensure that quality education is delivered in a culturally accessible form. One of the factors impeding such research is the lack of widely accepted theoretical frameworks (Dimmock & Walker, 2005). This paper examines the development and effectiveness of a cross cultural framework that was used to compare a Business program at a Canadian College with its branch campus in Qatar (Prowse & Goddard, 2010). Findings are compared to results in the literature to gauge the robustness of the framework. The framework developed in the study was found to be a helpful means of allowing a comparison of pedagogy across two cultures.