Search results

The purpose of this paper is to trace the development of entrepreneurship education in Malaysia; and to evaluate its effectiveness and limitations.

Primary data are collected to reveal students' perceptions of the effectiveness of the entrepreneurship teaching and their knowledge about entrepreneurship.

The results show that entrepreneurship education in Malaysia is not matching students' skill expectations with skill acquisition. The findings also indicate that the level of understanding on “what is entrepreneurship” is still low among the respondents selected in this paper.

The paper only concerns students' perceptions towards the effectiveness of entrepreneurship education in their respective institutions. Results from this paper are limited in terms of their ability to demonstrate “actual” outcomes of entrepreneurship education.

The paper provides an important exploratory analysis of the state of entrepreneurship education in Malaysia to enable further research to be taken in the area of entrepreneurship education. The findings provide valuable insight on effective teaching methodologies in the area of entrepreneurship education.

The paper expands the framework of Morris et al., Drucker, and Gorman et al. to provide a basis to improve the effectiveness of entrepreneurship education in Malaysia.

One of the most significant implications of technological advances in the banking sector is the possibility of delivering banking services through electronic channels (e‐channels). E‐channels provide alternatives for faster delivery of banking services to a wider scope of customers. Nowadays, e‐channels have gained increasing popularity in delivering banking services. However, prior to the implementation of e‐channels, several factors and investment costs must be identified to ensure a more cost effective and efficient execution of e‐channel services. A survey is thus conducted to determine factors that are essential for the successful implementation of e‐channels by domestic commercial banks in Malaysia. Data were collected from primary sources and were analysed via frequency analysis and factor analysis. The results of the survey suggested that banks’ operation management is the main factor affecting the success of ATMs, PC and branch banking, while product innovation and knowledge development factors are found to have the most significant effect on the success of banking kiosks and phone banking respectively.

Since independence in 1971, Bangladesh has undergone episodes of change and has recorded considerable economic achievements. In this study, a standard regression model is used to identify factors that significantly contribute to economic growth in Bangladesh. The factors under consideration are private and public investment, public and private consumption, export and import. All factors are found to have a significant positive relationship with GDP at 5 percent of significance level except for public investment. The result implies that privatisation process needs to be catered with greater attention for accelerating GDP growth. Import is found to be significant but with a negative relationship with GDP. The result indicates that with the increased in import, the GDP will decline further. As a matter of fact, more than 60 percent of the imported items are for consumption purposes which is not likely to contribute much to GDP growth. From the empirical estimation, it is suggested that prudence planning should be taken to enhance private investment, export, private and public consumption for a better living in the country.

By exploring the patterns of co-authorship, this paper aims to identify the degree and type of research collaboration in Malaysia.

A total of 22,244 publication records from five research universities in Malaysia were retrieved from Scopus database. Journal articles published for the period between 2008 and October 2011 were collected. Indicators such as number of authors, subject areas, number of local institutions and foreign countries, were analysed using simple statistical tools to identity the degree and type of collaboration.

The findings reveal that in Malaysia, researchers tend to work in teams but collaboration is more dominant in science-based research than social sciences. Academics published extensively with their colleagues from the same university or from other academic institutions, but there is little collaboration with researchers from public research institutes or industry. In terms of international collaboration, Iran, India, UK, Japan and the USA are the top five collaborating countries. Disciplines with significant international collaboration are physics and astronomy; chemistry; agricultural and biological sciences; engineering; health profession and computer sciences.

This paper is among the few that study the patterns of co-authorship in Malaysia and most probably the first to examine the patterns in the Malaysian research universities. The study highlights the skewed distribution of co-authorship patterns where there is limited evidence of cross sectors collaboration in journal publication. The findings call for policy makers as well as universities to look into the constraints as well as drivers that would enhance the linkage of different actors in the national research system.

Maintaining a low and stable inflation rate has become one of the challenges in the macroeconomic management of most countries. Among others, Malaysia has a very unique experience in terms of inflation. The economy has experienced episodes of high (1973‐1974, 1980‐1981) and low (1985‐1987) regimes of inflation, and was able to contain low and stable inflation during the high economic growth period of 1988‐1996. The objective of this study is to identify important factors that contribute significantly to inflation in Malaysia. This study also aimed to examine the possible existence of international and intra‐ASEAN inflation transmission to Malaysia. The analysis is carried out based on the time‐series approach of multivariate cointegration, vector error‐correction modeling, impulse response functions and variance decompositions. The empirical results of this study show that external factors such as exchange rate and the rest of ASEAN’s inflation are relatively more important than domestic factors in explaining Malaysian inflation.

The purpose of this paper is to propose the Collaborative Search System that attempts to achieve collaboration by implicitly identifying and reflecting search behaviour of collaborators in an academic network that is automatically and dynamically formed. By using the constructed Collaborative Hit Matrix (CHM), results are obtained that are based on the search behaviour and earned preferences of specialist communities of researchers, which are relevant to the user's need and reduce the time spent on bad links.

By using the Digital Bibliography Library Project (DBLP), the research communities are formed implicitly and dynamically based on the users’ research presence in the search environment and in the publication scenario, which is also used to assign users’ roles and establish links between the users. The CHM, to store the hit count and hit list of page results for queries, is also constructed and updated after every search session to enhance the collaborative search among the researchers.

The implicit researchers community formation, the assignment and dynamic updating of roles of the researchers based on research, search presence and search behaviour on the web as well as the usage of these roles during Collaborative Web Search have highly improved the relevancy of results. The CHM that holds the collaborative responses provided by the researchers on the search query results to support searching distinguishes this system from others. Thus the proposed system considerably improves the relevancy and reduces the time spent on bad links, thus improving recall and precision.

The research findings illustrate the better performance of the system, by connecting researchers working in the same field and allowing them to help each other in a web search environment.

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/19348830810915532. When citing the article, please cite: Lei-Yu Wu, Chun-Ju Wang, Chun-Yao Tseng, Ming-Cheng Wu, (2008), “Founding team and start-up competitive advantage”, International Journal of Organizational Analysis, Vol. 16 Iss: 1/2, pp. 138 - 151.

This study aims to develop a comprehensive LOHAS (lifestyles of health and sustainability) restaurant service quality scale by using a rigorous qualitative and quantitative research process to effectively measure the service quality of LOHAS restaurants. Moreover, this study aims to further identify the Kano quality characteristics and strategic meanings of service attributes in LOHAS restaurants.

This study designed the preliminary items of the service quality scale for LOHAS restaurants (LORSERV scale) based on relevant literatures and expert interview procedures. This study identified the goodness of fit of the questionnaire content, construct validity and validity of the LORSERV scale using exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. The moderated regression was conducted to identify the Kano quality characteristics and strategic meanings of each service attribute in LOHAS restaurants.

The results indicated that the LORSERV scale included seven dimensions (internal sense of happiness, transitiveness, environment, healthy catering, service commitment, green practicability and thoughtfulness), for a total of 33 items. According to the results of the Kano model, the seven service attributes were categorized into the attractive quality. A total of 25 service attributes were categorized into the one-dimensional quality, and one service attribute was categorized into the must-be quality.

The contribution of this study is that the scale could facilitate operators of LOHAS restaurants to effectively understand customer perceptions of service quality and serve as a reference to upgrade and improve service quality. The identification of Kano quality characteristics for each service attribute is conducive for LOHAS restaurants to understand the strategic meanings of each service attribute and can serve as a reference to make distinctive service strategies to reach sustainable operations.

From the sixteenth to eighteenth century, China underwent a commercial revolution similar to the one in contemporaneous Europe. The rise of market did foster the rise of a nascent bourgeois and the concomitant rise of a liberal, populist version of Confucianism, which advocated a more decentralized and less authoritarian political system in the last few decades of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). But after the collapse of the Ming Empire and the establishment of the Qing Empire (1644–1911) by the Manchu conquerors, the new rulers designated the late-Ming liberal ideologies as heretics, and they resurrected the most conservative form of Confucianism as the political orthodoxy. Under the principle of filial piety given by this orthodoxy, the whole empire was imagined as a fictitious family with the emperor as the grand patriarch and the civil bureaucrats and subjects as children or grandchildren. Under the highly centralized administrative and communicative apparatus of the Qing state, this ideology of the fictitious patrimonial state penetrated into the lowest level of the society. The subsequent paternalist, authoritarian, and moralizing politics of the Qing state contributed to China’s nontransition to capitalism despite its advanced market economy, and helped explain the peculiar form and trajectory of China’s popular contention in the eighteenth century. I also argue that this tradition of fictitious patrimonial politics continued to shape the state-making processes in twentieth-century China and beyond.

An automatic text annotation system (ATAS) that can collect resources from different databases through Linked Data (LD) for automatically annotating ancient texts was developed in this study to support digital humanities research. It allows the humanists referring to resources from diverse databases when interpreting ancient texts as well as provides a friendly text annotation reader for humanists interpreting ancient text through reading. The paper aims to discuss whether the ATAS is helpful to support digital humanities research or not.

Based on the quasi-experimental design, the ATAS developed in this study and MARKUS semi-ATAS were compared whether the significant differences in the reading effectiveness and technology acceptance for supporting humanists interpreting ancient text of the Ming dynasty’s collections existed or not. Additionally, lag sequential analysis was also used to analyze users’ operation behaviors on the ATAS. A semi-structured in-depth interview was also applied to understand users’ opinions and perception of using the ATAS to interpret ancient texts through reading.

The experimental results reveal that the ATAS has higher reading effectiveness than MARKUS semi-ATAS, but not reaching the statistically significant difference. The technology acceptance of the ATAS is significantly higher than that of MARKUS semi-ATAS. Particularly, the function comparison of the two systems shows that the ATAS presents more perceived ease of use on the functions of term search, connection to source websites and adding annotation than MARKUS semi-ATAS. Furthermore, the reading interface of ATAS is simple and understandable and is more suitable for reading than MARKUS semi-ATAS. Among all the considered LD sources, Moedict, which is an online Chinese dictionary, was confirmed as the most helpful one.

This study adopted Jieba Chinese parser to perform the word segmentation process based on a parser lexicon for the Chinese ancient texts of the Ming dynasty’s collections. The accuracy of word segmentation to a lexicon-based Chinese parser is limited due to ignoring the grammar and semantics of ancient texts. Moreover, the original parser lexicon used in Jieba Chinese parser only contains the modern words. This will reduce the accuracy of word segmentation for Chinese ancient texts. The two limitations that affect Jieba Chinese parser to correctly perform the word segmentation process for Chinese ancient texts will significantly affect the effectiveness of using ATAS to support digital humanities research. This study thus proposed a practicable scheme by adding new terms into the parser lexicon based on humanists’ self-judgment to improve the accuracy of word segmentation of Jieba Chinese parser.

Although some digital humanities platforms have been successfully developed to support digital humanities research for humanists, most of them have still not provided a friendly digital reading environment to support humanists on interpreting texts. For this reason, this study developed an ATAS that can automatically retrieve LD sources from different databases on the Internet to supply rich annotation information on reading texts to help humanists interpret texts. This study brings digital humanities research to a new ground.

This study proposed a novel ATAS that can automatically annotate useful information on an ancient text to increase the readability of the ancient text based on LD sources from different databases, thus helping humanists obtain a deeper and broader understanding in the ancient text. Currently, there is no this kind of tool developed for humanists to support digital humanities research.