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According to human capital theory, companies derive economic value from the knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) of their employees. Research conducted by strategic human resource management has focused on how investment in human capital can create a competitive advantage for an organization. The purpose of the paper is, therefore, to investigate how the choice of different human capital acquisition strategies – “make or buy” – can influence employee attitudes and behavior.

This study explores the relationship between internal and external human capital strategies and employee’s attitudes and behavior in Taiwan's IC (integrated circuit) design industry. The cross-sectional dataset derives from a sample of 49 human resource departments and 497 employees from 25 different IC design companies.

The findings indicate that the decisions made on human capital strategies have an important influence on employee’s attitude and behavior. The results also show that a climate of trust and perceived organizational support is a cross-level mechanism for both human capital strategy and employees' attitudes and behavior.

There has been little research on the cross-level analysis of human capital acquisition strategies that can influence employee’s attitudes and behavior. This study verified that internal and external human capital strategies do affect employees' individual perceptions of organizational support via the organizational-level climate of trust, which in turn influences employees' attitudes and behavior. This cross-level mechanism indeed will facilitate new insights into the nature of strategic human resource management.

Drawing on the Ability–Motivation–Opportunity (AMO) theory, this study aims to test the effect of green human resource management (G-HRM) on green organizational citizenship behavior (G-OCB) taking into consideration green culture as the mediator and green values as the moderator.

Valid data from 240 entities collected in Taiwan were analyzed to test the five hypotheses. The valid data were analyzed using confirmatory factor model, correlation analysis, structural equation modeling and bootstrapping analysis.

The results for all relationships show significant associations. G-HRM is significantly associated with G-OCB and green culture, while green culture is significantly related to G-OCB. The mediating effect of green culture on the G-HRM-G-OCB relationship is significant. The moderating effect of green values on the green culture–G-OCB relationship is significant.

The originality of this study lies in being one of the first study in an advanced emerging economy utilizing the AMO theory.

The purpose of this study is to examine the indirect impact of job demands on recovery self-efficacy via the mediation of job burnout. The study also investigates the moderating effects of school-to-work facilitation and psychological detachment in the indirect relationship between job demands and recovery self-efficacy.

The study recruited and surveyed 263 employed graduate students in the executive master of business administration program in Taiwan. Regression analysis was used to examine the proposed relationships.

The results showed that job burnout mediated the relationship between job demands and recovery self-efficacy. The relationship was weaker when school-to-work facilitation and psychological detachment were high.

This study confirms the indirect effects of job demands on recover self-efficacy through job burnout and provides new insights into the role of school-to-work facilitation and psychological detachment to enhance the recovery in the JD-R model.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential causes of the reduction of cotton cultivation in Shandong Province of China from the perspective of smallholders and notably examine the role of off-farm employment.

This paper extends an integrated behavioral model to analyze the relationship between off-farm employment and cotton cultivation by taking into account farmers’ risk attitudes. A household survey data of 144 Bt cotton farmers in six villages in Linqing County, Shandong Province conducted in 2012 and 2013 is used. A simultaneous equations model is established and further estimated by using three-stage least squares method.

Although the introduction of Bt cotton has promoted the increase in cotton acreage in China from 1999 to 2007, the planting area of cotton has been decreasing since 2007. The results show the significant correlations among risk attitude, off-farm employment, and cotton cultivation. The planting area of cotton is positively correlated with farmers’ willingness to take risk but negatively associated with off-farm employment of family members. The findings imply that the rapid emergence of off-farm labor markets is a major reason for the reduction of cotton acreage in Shandong Province. In the context of the more opportunities of off-farm employment in China, cotton acreage is expected to decrease further.

The findings provide a reasonable explanation for the reduction of cotton cultivation in Shandong. This analysis contributes to a better understanding of the relationships among individual risk attitude, off-farm employment, and agricultural behavior, thereby adding to the literature about the application of the integrated behavioral model.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of farmers’ risk perceptions regarding rubber farming on their land use choices, including rubber specialization and crop diversification.

A cross-sectional survey data of some 600 smallholder rubber farmers in Xishuangbanna in Southwest China is employed. This paper develops a general conceptual framework that incorporates a subjective risk item into a model of farmers’ land use choices, thereby developing four econometric models to estimate the role of risk perceptions, and applies instrumental variables to control for the endogeneity of risk perceptions.

The results demonstrate that risk perceptions play an important role in smallholders’ decision-making regarding land use strategies to address potential risks in rubber farming. Smallholders with higher risk perceptions specialize in rubber farming less often and are more likely to diversify their land use, thereby contributing to local environmental conservation in terms of agrobiodiversity. The land use choices of smallholder rubber farmers are also associated with ethnicity, household wealth, off-farm employment, land tenure status, altitude and rubber farming experience.

This study contributes to a better understanding of the implications of farmers’ risk perceptions and shows entry points for improving the sustainability of rubber-based land use systems.

This paper aims to explore the developing trend of higher pedagogy, to promote the research of higher pedagogy to be more canonical and scientific and to improve the higher education theory.

The utility research uses a method of quantitative study, namely “content analysis”, to estimate and analyze the higher education theory literature on ten dimensionalities which include theme, author, abstract, keywords, subject, proposing of the issue, definition of key terms, research methods, conclusion, reference and annotations from 1996 to 2006 in China.

The analysis of the selected 250 academic theses and reports in the field of higher education shows that academic research and theoretical standard have been improved, meanwhile academic criterion have been formed by degrees in higher pedagogy within ten years. At the same time, there are still some problems in the papers and reports the authors have selected such as title, key words, proposing of the issue, researching method and conclusion.

This paper sums up the trend of research on higher education in China for the past ten years, and points out the problems in this trend and then proposes ways to improve the research of higher education in China.

The purpose of this paper is to review a sample of the literature relating to the financial impacts of supply chain management (SCM) and suggest future research directions.

49 research articles between 1990 and 2011 are collected from various academic databases and online sources. By conducting content analysis, empirical findings on the relationship between SCM and firm-level financial performance are summarized and classified. Performance drivers are identified from the literature to guide future SC practices.

Both accounting- and market-based financial performances are closely related to the effectiveness of SCM. As important performance drivers, sourcing strategy, information technology (IT), SC integration, and external relationships play critical roles to improve firm-level financial performance. In particular, optimal levels of outsourceability, SC alignment and integration with IT infrastructure, and SC relationship management are essential to realize full financial advantages of effective SCM.

A better understanding and demonstration on how SCM makes positive contributions to financial performance help SCM managers to better communicate with top management and substantiate their roles in the organization.

To the authors' best knowledge, this paper is the first and the most comprehensive literature review in a much-needed research area. A number of performance drivers are identified to provide practical guidance. Some promising research areas are suggested for further investigation.

The objective is to have a better understanding of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on food supply chain in Wuhan.

Through a simplified flow, the authors qualitatively analyze the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on food supply chain. Data was gathered through a telephone survey of food suppliers in Wuhan.

The prevention measures of the COVID-19 pandemic had negative impacts on food supply chain in Wuhan. About 83.1% of food suppliers experienced a decrease in revenues. This is influenced by factors including food category on sale, purchase channel of food, food supplier's household registration and the number of the COVID-19 patients in the located community.

Due to the limitation of available data, there is a lack of quantitative analysis on the impact on food supply chain. The sample size of food suppliers is limited.

This study identifies the challenges in the food supply chain resulting from the control measures implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan and provides a reference for the design of control measures in other regions.

This study supplements the literature regarding the impact of public health emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic on food supply chain, especially food suppliers' revenues.

This paper aims to consider each strategy of the particle swarm optimization (PSO) as a unit in data envelopment analysis (DEA) and uses the minimax mixed-integer linear programming DEA approach to find the most suitable inertia weight strategy. A total of 15 inertia weight strategies were empirically examined in a suite of 42 benchmark problems in the view of DEA.

PSO is very sensitive to inertia weight strategies, and therefore, an important amount of research attempts has been concentrated on these strategies. There is no research into the determination of the most suitable inertia weight strategy; however, there are a large number of comparisons related to the inertia weight strategies. DEA is one of the performance evaluation methods, and its models classify the set of strategies into two distinct sets as efficient and inefficient. However, only one of the strategies should be used in the PSO algorithm. Some effective models were proposed to find the most efficient strategy.

The experimental studies demonstrate that an approach is a useful tool in the determination of the most suitable strategy. Besides, if the author encounters a new complex problem whose properties are known, it will help the author to choose the best strategy.

A heavy oil thermal cracking three lumps model for the simplification of the reaction system was used because it is an important complicated chemical process. In addition, the soil water retention curve (SWRC) plays an important role in diverse facets of agricultural engineering. As the SWRC can be regarded as a nonlinear function between the water content and the soil water potential, Van Genuchten model is proposed to describe this function. To determinate these model parameters, an optimization problem is formulated, which minimizes the difference between the measured and modeled data.

In this paper, the PSO algorithm is integrated with minimax mixed-integer linear programming to find the most suitable inertia weight strategy. In this way, the best strategy could be chosen for a new more complex problem.