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The purpose of this paper is to explore the roles of public libraries in the context of Big Data.

A mixed method approach was used and had two main data collection phases. A survey of public libraries was used to generate an overview of which professional roles connect public libraries with Big Data. Eight roles were identified, namely, educator, marketer, data organiser, data container, advocator, advisor, developer and organisation server. Semi-structured interviews with library directors and managers were then conducted to gain a deeper understanding of these roles and how they connect to the library’s overall functions.

Results of the survey indicated that librarians lack a proper comprehension of and a pragmatic application of Big Data. Their opinions on the eight roles are slightly stronger than neutral. However, they do not demonstrate any strong agreement on these eight roles. In the interviews, the eight roles attained more clear support and are classified into two groups: service-oriented and system-oriented roles.

As an emerging research field, Big Data is not widely discussed in the library context, especially in public libraries. Therefore, this study fills a research gap between public libraries and Big Data. In addition, Big Data in public libraries could be well managed and readily approached by citizens in undertaking such roles, which entails that public libraries will eventually benefit from the Big Data era.

Managerial social capital could exert valuable influences to firms' operating performance in social networks. Through the lens of structural hole theory, the relational rents of managerial social capital partly results from certain controlling power endured by the network structure, thereby potentially signifying opportunistic behaviors once such relational rents are acquired at the cost of other parties' potential value loss. As such, it can be expected that using managerial social capital may inherently evoke a focal firm's high tendency of opportunism in its cooperative arrangement. This paper mainly aims at shedding lights on the opportunism implications of managerial social capital in the context of interorganizational relationships.

The authors collected data from 197 manufacturing joint ventures in China mainland.

Based on these sample Chinese‐foreign joint ventures, this paper found that member firms' managerial social capital tend to strengthen their opportunistic behaviors in special interfirm relationships, such that opportunistic behaviors mainly aim at taking control of the procedure of relation arrangement without significantly influencing relationship performance as well as its outcome distribution.

By demonstrating certain downsides of social capital, such that using social capital could induce opportunistic behaviors in interfirm relationships, it is expected that the study to contribute to both future social capital and joint venture research and business practices, especially to joint venture operations in China.

Strategic group has been intensively studied since this term emerged in 1970s, but previous studies have been limited to the comparisons between groups such as performance comparison. The purpose of this paper is to explore the internal structure of strategic groups by examining the effect of strategic distance from a firm to the center of its strategic group on firm performance.

The research is based on data acquired from the annual reports of listed companies and some Chinese domestic databases, including CSMAR Solution, WIND financial database, and China Core Newspapers Full-text Database. After grouping listed pharmaceutical companies in China over the period 2010-2011, the authors test three hypotheses by using fixed effect regressions.

The paper finds that the strategic distance from a firm to the center of its strategic group has a significant negative effect on the firm's financial performance. Two factors are discovered to influence that effect: corporate diversification strengthens the negative effect of strategic distance on performance, while firm's media visibility weakens that negative effect.

The findings reveal the relationship between intra-group strategic positioning and firm performance, and specify how firms can gain competitive advantage through positioning choices and strategic actions. This study promotes the establishment of a more comprehensive strategic group theory by revealing the structure within strategic groups.

This paper aims to systematically examine the key notion of integration of non-market and market strategies in the increasingly popular study of corporate non-market strategies.

This paper is based on a brief literature review of the non-market strategy (NMS) research that shows the existing literature does not offer a clear and systematic account of the key notion of integration. It suggests any systematic account of integration should address at least three interrelated questions, i.e. why, what and how to integrate non-market and market strategies?

For the why question, the authors use a formal model to demonstrate that the essence of the most important type of integration synergy lies in the positive spillover or externality from non-market to market strategies. For the what question, the authors identify the contents of integration at three levels, i.e. the level of non-market environment analysis, the level of NMS choice, and the level of non-market dynamic interactions. For the how question, the authors argue that the combination of non-market and market strategies should be seamless in terms of horizontal, vertical and intentional coordination. Overall, the authors argue, only when the right contents are combined and seamlessly coordinated will there be high synergies from integration of non-market and market strategies.

Managers are advised to give non-market strategies full attention. Managers charged with non-market tasks should explore how to seamlessly coordinate non-market and market strategies in order to gain maximal synergies.

This paper is the first to examine the key notion of integration in a systematic manner. It is the first to propose a three-question solution to systematic understanding of the notion and the first to propose the seamless coordination concept and its associated three aspects of seamless coordination.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the sustainable development thought is one good reason why Chinese civilization is continuously developing, and it can be used as a reference for the development of Chinese agriculture today.

The paper employs a historical analysis approach to examine the sustainable thoughts concerning Chinese traditional agriculture, including view of sancai, farming season, fertility, the nature of matters, recycling, and economization.

The results reveal that the nature of Chinese traditional agriculture is akin to ecological agriculture, which is precious heritage for China and the whole world.

The originality of this paper is that it confirms the fundamental reason of the continuous development of Chinese civilization which, based on organization of sustainable development thought, lies in traditional agriculture.

Sustainable supply chain finance (SSCF) is a fascinated consideration for both academics and practitioners because the indicators are still underdeveloped in achieving SSCF. This study proposes a bibliometric data-driven analysis from the literature to illustrate a clear overall concept of SSCF that reveals hidden indicators for further improvement.

A hybrid quantitative and qualitative approach combining data-driven analysis, fuzzy Delphi method (FDM), entropy weight method (EWM) and fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (FDEMATEL) is employed to address the uncertainty in the context.

The results show that blockchain, cash flow shortage, reverse factoring, risk assessment and triple bottom line (TBL) play significant roles in SSCF. A comparison of the challenges and gaps among different geographic regions is provided in both advanced local perspective and a global state-of-the-art assessment. There are 35 countries/territories being categorized into five geographic regions. Of the five regions, two, Latin America and the Caribbean and Africa, show the needs for more improvement, exclusively in collaboration strategies and financial crisis. Exogenous impacts of wars, natural disasters and disease epidemics are implied as inevitable attributes for enhancing the sustainability.

This study contributes to (1) boundary SSCF foundations by data driven, (2) identifying the critical SSCF indicators and providing the knowledge gaps and directions as references for further examination and (3) addressing the gaps and challenges in different geographic regions to provide advanced assessment from local viewpoint and to diagnose the comprehensive global state of the art of SSCF.

Construction and demolition waste (CDW) continuously causes environmental and social problems. These formidable challenges lead to sustainable issues and are an increasingly urgent issue worldwide. Prior studies have neglected to link the triple bottom line (TBL) to a reliable estimation or empirical model for estimating CDW production performance and lack empirical sensitivity analysis in profit maximization. This study proposes an attribute analysis to build a cost–benefit analysis (CBA) to obtain profit maximization.

This study uses fuzzy set theory to develop a cost and benefit analysis (CBA) model to assess the sensitivity analysis in terms of its performance on addressing the environmental, economic and social aspects. The model is used to weigh the sum of benefits such as financial gain and total costs of actions taken to mitigate the negative impacts.

Based on the sensitivity analysis conducted, the environmental, economic and social mean scales were significantly changed, i.e. increased, and profits increased drastically. The results provide an insight into environmental legislation compliance, environmental investment and environmental impact as the cause attributes for the CDW recycling profit increase. The results prove that sensitivity analysis is viable to infer that a sustainable production performance can achieve more revenue and profit through an adequate selection of attributes regarding the TBL aspects to address the firm's uncertainty problem in multiple criteria analysis.

This study builds a CBA model to maximize profits for recycled CDW material by linking of environmental, economic and societal aspects for recycled CDW assessments. It considers a sustainability structure with criteria based on TBL aspects to assess production performance to realize the Sustainable Development Goals and presents fuzzy set theory and sensitivity analysis to solve the uncertainty problem in the construction industry.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how specialised capabilities including absorptive capacity and marketing capabilities influence innovation commercialisation in manufacturing and service firms in Nigeria. The authors hypothesise that absorptive capacity measures including openness and formal training for innovation, and marketing capabilities encompassing new product marketing and marketing innovation are positively associated with innovation performance.

The authors examine commercialisation of innovation within the profiting from innovation (PFI) and dynamic capabilities (DC) framework and use data from the 2012 Nigeria Innovation Survey to test the hypothesis by means of a Heckman sample selection model.

The authors find that absorptive capacity measures comprising openness and formal training are positively associated with innovation performance. The authors also find that marketing capabilities as indicated by new product marketing and marketing innovation are positively associated with innovation performance.

The authors acknowledge that firms undergo continuous changes and that there may be the presence of unobserved or unmeasured heterogeneity. Taking into cognisance that Nigeria is a federal state, cultural diversity and economic factors are likely to differ widely between geographical regions. Also, while the proposed conceptual framework offers a deeper understanding of innovation performance, examining how integrating activities of the R&D department, human resource department and marketing department affect innovation commercialisation is likely to provide more meaningful insights.

The role that inter-organisational learning and intra-organisational learning play in driving innovation performance provide managers with a basis for incorporating absorptive capacity building programs that boost employees’ ability to recognise and apply valuable external knowledge to commercial ends. Similarly, firms may benefit from offering marketing capabilities development programs. Furthermore, innovation policies in Nigeria are generally designed to focus on fostering innovation activities aimed at developing innovative output. Accordingly, government support explicitly targeting new product marketing and marketing innovation is likely to play a vital role in the successful commercialisation of innovation in Nigeria.

This study fuses the PFI and DC framework to examine why innovating firms may not necessarily succeed. This area of study has received scant attention in sub-Saharan Africa given that extant literature focusses on value creation as opposed to value capture.

The purpose of this paper is to provide the historical background of genealogical records and analyze the value of Chinese genealogical research through the study of names and genealogical resources.

The paper examines the historical evolution and value of Chinese genealogical records, with the focus on researching the Islamic Chinese names used by the people living in Guilin. The highlight of this paper includes the analysis and evolution of the Islamic Chinese names commonly adopted by the local people in Guilin. It concludes with the recommendations on emphasizing and making the best use of genealogical records to enhance the research value of Chinese overseas studies.

The paper covers the history of Islam and describes how the religion was introduced into China, as well as Muslims' ethnicity and identity. It also places focus on the importance of building a research collection in Asian history and Chinese genealogy.

This research study has a strong subject focus on Chinese genealogy, Asian history, and Islamic Chinese surnames. It is a narrow field that few researchers have delved into.

The results of this study will assist students, researchers, and the general public in tracing the origin of their surnames and developing their interest in the social and historical value of Chinese local history and genealogies.

The study of Chinese surnames is, by itself, a particular field for researching the social and political implications of contemporary Chinese society during the time the family members lived.

Very little research has been done in the area of Chinese local history and genealogy. The paper would be of value to researchers such as historians, sociologists, ethnologists and archaeologists, as well as students and anyone interested in researching a surname origin, its history and evolution.

The purpose of this study is to analyze from multiple perspectives, so as to form an effective massive open online course (MOOC)personalized recommendation method to help learners efficiently obtain MOOC resources.

This study introduced ontology construction technology and a new semantic association algorithm to form a new MOOC resource personalized recommendation idea. On the one hand, by constructing a learner model and a MOOC resource ontology model, based on the learner’s characteristics, the learner’s MOOC resource learning preference is predicted, and a recommendation list is formed. On the other hand, the semantic association algorithm is used to calculate the correlation between the MOOC resources to be recommended and the learners’ rated resources and predict the learner’s learning preferences to form a recommendation list. Finally, the two recommendation lists were comprehensively analyzed to form the final MOOC resource personalized recommendation list.

The semantic association algorithm based on hierarchical correlation analysis and attribute correlation analysis introduced in this study can effectively analyze the semantic similarity between MOOC resources. The hybrid recommendation method that introduces ontology construction technology and performs semantic association analysis can effectively realize the personalized recommendation of MOOC resources.

This study has formed an effective method for personalized recommendation of MOOC resources, solved the problems existing in the personalized recommendation that is, the recommendation relies on the learner’s rating of the resource, the recommendation is specialized, and the knowledge structure of the recommended resource is static, and provides a new idea for connecting MOOC learners and resources.