Search results

While the usage of digital technology can bring many operational improvements for firms, it is unclear whether it can effectively improve firm resilience to deal with supply chain disruptions caused by emergencies such as COVID-19. From a dynamic capability perspective, this study aims to investigate how digital technology usage can improve firm resilience in a rapidly changing and turbulent environment.

Based on the survey sample of 237 Chinese firms, the stepwise regression approach was used to examine the proposed research hypotheses.

The empirical evidence shows that digital technology usage has a U-shaped effect on firm resilience, and that effect is fully achieved by first affecting market acuity and then promoting resource reconfiguration. Moreover, the authors further found that the U-shaped association between digital technology usage and firm resilience is derived from the U-shaped association between digital technology usage and market acuity.

This study enriches the resilience literature by revealing the mechanism of digital technology usage’s effects rather than focusing on the role of specific digital technologies. This study also provides guidance for firms to develop effective digital technology usage strategies.

This case is based on an existing firm. The names have not been changed, and all data on the firm’s history and opportunities is accurate. Primary data is based on interviews with the owner of the firm. One of the authors is a client of the studio and friend of the owner. The case has been reviewed and approved by Jill Murphey, owner of yogaErie. The purpose of this paper is to introduce students to industry analysis, to entrepreneurial decisions and to issues with organizational growth and change.

Jill Murphey, owner of Yoga Erie, is considering whether to or how to expand her studio operations into adjacent communities. Her studio has been very successful since she opened in 2009: the studio has been named Erie’s Best for most of the years since then. Classes were filled and students were asking about the prospects of a satellite studio in other parts of the community. Information on the options Murphey was considering are presented as well as Murphey’s motivations in opening her own studio, and the opportunities as well as concerns she faced in the expansion decision.

This case was originally targeted toward graduate and undergraduate courses in Strategy because of the industry definition and diversification problems but can also be used in classes on Organizational Change or Entrepreneurship.

This paper mainly focuses on how to induce all members to represent members' true preferences for supply and demand matching of E-commerce platform in order to generate stable matching schemes with more social welfare of Multi-agent Matching Platform (MMP) and individually stable advantages than traditional methods.

An MMP is designed. Meanwhile, a true preference inducing method, Lower-Bid Ranking (LBR), is proposed to reduce the number of false preferences, which is helpful to solve the problem that too much false preferences leads to low efficiency of platform operation and supply and demand matching. Then, a systematic model of LBR-based Stable Matching (SM-LBR) is proposed.

To obtain an ideal transaction partner, the adequate preference ordering and modifying according to market environment is needed for everyone, and the platform should give full play to the platforms' information advantages and process historical transaction and cooperation data. Meanwhile, the appropriate supply and demand matching is beneficial to improve the efficiency and quality of platform operation, and the design of matching guidance mechanism is essential.

The numerical experiments show that, the proposed model (SM-LBR) can induce members to represent the model's true preferences for stable matching and generate effective matchings with more social welfare of MMP and individually stable advantages than traditional methods, which may provide necessary method and model reference for the research of stable matching and E-commerce platform operation.

Identifying factors that impact workers’ health and performance is extremely important for companies and, in particular, for companies in the construction sector. Despite the evidence, knowledge about the relationship between commuting, health and worker performance is still limited. More specifically on the relationship with work engagement, studies focus on work-related aspects, neglecting individual and behavioral factors. This study aims to verify the relationship between the commuting patterns of workers, their health and their work engagement in a civil construction company located in São José dos Campos, Brazil.

A structured questionnaire was applied to 43 civil construction workers. The participants’ physical and mental health was evaluated using the 12-item short-form health survey. Employees’ work engagement was assessed through the UWES-17 scale. A descriptive statistical analysis was performed on the relationship between physical and mental health, engagement and commuting to work.

The result corroborated the literature showing that the use of active transport positively influenced the mental health of construction workers and negatively affected those who use individual motorized transport. People working from home had the lowest values for total engagement, vigor and dedication.

This study provides evidence and a prior understanding of this relationship, serving as a basis for decision-making processes in the area of transport that contribute to the health and better functioning of companies in the construction sector. This work also contributes to the state of the art on the relationship between commuting, health and worker engagement.

The purpose of this study is to augment the perceived service quality (PSQ) dimensions as well as evaluate the effects of pandemic susceptibility and severity by appending crucial enablers of customer satisfaction (CS) in the restaurant industry (RI).

The top 10 restaurants from Mumbai and Kolkata were selected based on the Conde Nast Traveller Magazine List, 2020. The study used a cross-sectional design to collect responses from 840 respondents across the two major metropolitans of India after the second wave of COVID-19 by employing a structured questionnaire. The proffered hypotheses in this study were validated using factor analysis and structural equation modelling (SEM) techniques.

This research espies pivotal facilitators of CS and customers' perceived value (CPV). The results divulge that food quality (FQ) and tangibility dimensions markedly enhance CS while the FQ and digital technologies (DT) dimensions augment CPV in Indian restaurants. The study asserts that CPV acts as a partial mediator between FQ and DT on the one hand and CS on the other. In addition, perceived pandemic susceptibility (PPSU) and perceived pandemic severity (PPSE) moderate the association between CPV and CS in restaurants.

This study exemplifies the critical enablers of CS and CPV that may invigorate restaurant owners, managers and policymakers to prioritize the identified dimensions to aggrandize CS and CPV quotients.

The study enriches the literature by assimilating DT and CPV dimensions in a comprehensive theoretical framework. The research is unique in attempting to unfurl the moderating effects of PPSU and PPSE in the RI.

This work examines the effects of strain rate on the effective yield strength of high-strength steel at elevated temperatures, through tensile coupon tests at various strain rates, to propose appropriate reduction factors considering the strain rate effect.

The stress–strain relationships of 385 N/mm2, 440 N/mm2 and 630 N/mm2-class steel plates at elevated temperatures are examined at three strain rate values (0.3%/min, 3.0%/min and 7.5%/min), and the reduction factors for the effective yield strength at elevated temperatures are evaluated from the results. A differential evolution-based optimization is used to produce the reduction-factor curves.

The strain rate effect enhances with an increase in the standard design value of the yield point. The effective yield strength and standard design value of the yield point exhibit high linearity between 600 and 700 °C. In addition to effectively evaluating the test results, the proposed reduction-factor curves can also help determine the ultimate strength of a steel member at collapse.

The novelty of this study is the quantitative evaluation of the relationship between the standard design value of yield point at ambient temperature and the strain-rate effect at elevated temperatures. It has been observed that the effect of the strain rate at elevated temperatures increases with the increase in the standard design value of the yield point for various steel strength grades.

A cross-domain intelligent software-defined network (SDN) routing method based on a proposed multiagent deep reinforcement learning (MDRL) method is developed.

First, the network is divided into multiple subdomains managed by multiple local controllers, and the state information of each subdomain is flexibly obtained by the designed SDN multithreaded network measurement mechanism. Then, a cooperative communication module is designed to realize message transmission and message synchronization between the root and local controllers, and socket technology is used to ensure the reliability and stability of message transmission between multiple controllers to acquire global network state information in real time. Finally, after the optimal intradomain and interdomain routing paths are adaptively generated by the agents in the root and local controllers, a network traffic state prediction mechanism is designed to improve awareness of the cross-domain intelligent routing method and enable the generation of the optimal routing paths in the global network in real time.

Experimental results show that the proposed cross-domain intelligent routing method can significantly improve the network throughput and reduce the network delay and packet loss rate compared to those of the Dijkstra and open shortest path first (OSPF) routing methods.

Message transmission and message synchronization for multicontroller interdomain routing in SDN have long adaptation times and slow convergence speeds, coupled with the shortcomings of traditional interdomain routing methods, such as cumbersome configuration and inflexible acquisition of network state information. These drawbacks make it difficult to obtain global state information about the network, and the optimal routing decision cannot be made in real time, affecting network performance. This paper proposes a cross-domain intelligent SDN routing method based on a proposed MDRL method. First, the network is divided into multiple subdomains managed by multiple local controllers, and the state information of each subdomain is flexibly obtained by the designed SDN multithreaded network measurement mechanism. Then, a cooperative communication module is designed to realize message transmission and message synchronization between root and local controllers, and socket technology is used to ensure the reliability and stability of message transmission between multiple controllers to realize the real-time acquisition of global network state information. Finally, after the optimal intradomain and interdomain routing paths are adaptively generated by the agents in the root and local controllers, a prediction mechanism for the network traffic state is designed to improve awareness of the cross-domain intelligent routing method and enable the generation of the optimal routing paths in the global network in real time. Experimental results show that the proposed cross-domain intelligent routing method can significantly improve the network throughput and reduce the network delay and packet loss rate compared to those of the Dijkstra and OSPF routing methods.

This study aims to examine the joint effect of internal quality integration and product innovation on financial performance by considering the mediating roles of incremental and radical product innovation.

A theoretical framework was developed using the organizational capability view. Based on empirical survey data collected from 209 Chinese manufacturing firms, this research uses structural equation modeling and the bootstrapping method to test hypotheses.

The results show that internal quality integration positively impacts incremental and radical product innovation and financial performance. Further, incremental product innovation can promote radical product innovation. Both incremental and radical product innovation partially mediate the relationship between internal quality integration and financial performance.

The findings provide practical guidance for manufacturing companies to engage in quality integration and product innovation. Managers should encourage the internal functional departments to coordinate quality integration while promoting incremental and radical product innovation to occupy a larger market and achieve higher performance.

This research contributes to the literature in two ways. First, this study expands the theoretical research framework of the joint effects of quality integration and product innovation on financial performance. Second, through testing the mediating role of product innovation, this study provides empirical evidence for the intermediate role of internal quality integration for improving financial performance.

This study aims to investigate the critical role of online brand community (OBC) engagement and brand evangelism: the role of age, gender and membership number.

To achieve the study’s objective, 303 active Facebook OBC users were surveyed. The AMOS structural equation modelling (SEM) is used to test the hypothesised model.

The results indicate that OBC engagement improves brand evangelism. Specifically, the results show that age, gender, and OBC membership number moderate the relationship between OBC engagement and brand evangelism. Interestingly, this study found that female, younger and low-OBC follower consumers more significantly contribute to nourishing brand evangelism than male, older and high-OBC follower counterparts.

OBC engagement is validated as a key brand evangelism driver, further substantiating its role as a crucial strategic metric. Moreover, age, gender and OBC membership number as moderating factors in the association between OBC engagement and brand evangelism (word of mouth referral, brand defence and future purchases) have been verified. Although the findings suggest that improved OBC engagement contributes to evangelism, this effect transpires more significantly among female, younger and low-OBC followers than male, older and high-OBC followers.

The present paper aims at defining and analyzing the techniques, strategies, and challenges in translating the euphemism of two English interpretations of the Holy Quran. The first is the translation of Abdullah Yusuf Ali (14 April 1872–10 December 1953), whereas the second is the translation of Arthur John Arberry (12 May 1905–2 October 1969).

The study adopts a qualitative approach that is introduced through a theoretical framework thatdiscusses and elaborates on the term “euphemism”. After that, the study uses analytical approaches in order to define and analyze the techniques and strategies in translating the euphemism of two English interpretations of the Holy Quran.

The results elaborate on the techniques used by the two translators to translate the euphemisms of two English interpretations of the Holy Quran.

The reason for selecting these two translations is to find the different techniques and approaches of both Eastern and Western translators. The main analysis of the study is based on Newmark’s perceptions about the techniques and strategies of translation.