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The purpose of this paper is to construct the structure of Chinese enterprise managers' human‐nature view with Chinese characteristics, and also to make comparison analysis on human‐nature views of managers from different types of enterprises, and between managers and ordinary employees. Finally, this paper proposes some human resource management (HRM) suggestions for enterprises in China.

This paper constructs Chinese enterprise managers' humanity view model with Chinese characteristics. First, relevant studies about humanity assumptions from both China and the West are reviewed, followed by the hypotheses of this study. Then, the study adopts the self‐compiled enterprise managers' humanity view questionnaire (EMHVQ), together with interviews, to study managers' views on humanity in Chinese background.

The humanity view of Chinese enterprise managers has its uniqueness. Its structure is first level with two factors and second level with ten factors, an organic unity of “human complexity” and “human interests”. The two factors of the first level are “human complexity” and “human interests”. The dimension “human complexity” includes seven factors: complexity of human needs, validity of reward and punishment, work competency, groupism of behaviors, positivity of attitudes, contingency of management and influence of interpersonal relations; the dimension “human interests” includes three factors: driving function of profits, evasion of responsibility and dependency of incentives. Remarkable differences exist in humanity views among managers from different types of enterprises and between managers and ordinary employees, which will exert great influence on the management style of enterprises in China.

Both in China and the West, few scholars or experts adopt empirical research to construct the structure of managers' humanity‐view model specifically based on China's cultural background. This paper not only contributes to the further development of this field, but also provides valuable suggestions for HRM, both for China and the rest of the world.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how well local planners have recognized the issues surrounding climate change, the analysis that jurisdictions have conducted on climate change, and policies that have been implemented to address climate change.

This study conducted a mail questionnaire survey for 214 counties ' planning directors in the USA and received 53 effective responses. This survey examined how well local planning directors have been prepared for climate change, including awareness, analysis scope, and implementation strategy.

The descriptive results indicate that the directors who responded to this survey had a relatively high (79.87 percent) level of awareness for climate change; but they had limited (34.94 percent) analysis scopes to assess the sources, impacts, and risk of climate change in their jurisdictions. These directors had partially but not fully (51.51 percent) developed local land use planning implementation strategies to mitigate or adapt climate change. The regression model indicates that the political commitment and planning personnel resources have significant influence on local planning directors ' actions for climate change.

This paper provides policy implications to improve local land use planning ability for climate change mitigation and adaptation.

The aim of this study is to explore the mediating role of executive competency in entrepreneurial-orientated corporations between entrepreneurial orientation and corporate performance.

The authors conducted a survey of entrepreneurial-oriented enterprises mainly located in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Shenyang, Dalian, Anshan, Chengdu, Guiyang, Wuhan, Taiyuan, Xi’an, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and so on, areas which cover North China, northeast of China, Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta, and are largely representative of the population as a whole. A total of 300 questionnaires were issued with 276 returns, a response rate of 92 per cent; 248 of these were valid.

First, executive competency in entrepreneurial-oriented corporations has four dimensions. These are profession features, concept features, interpersonal features and individual internal drive features; 15 competency elements are included in the above dimensions. Second, entrepreneurial orientation does improve corporate performance, and the positive influence is mainly through two dimensions, which are innovation and antecedence. Third, executive competency has a positive influence on corporate performance, thus confirming the effectiveness of executive competency as a dependent variable. Finally, executive competency has a partial mediating influence on the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and corporate performance, with a full mediating influence on innovation and corporate performance, and a partial mediating influence on antecedence and corporate performance.

The conclusions have important implications. Theoretically, the executive competency model, which fits entrepreneurial orientation, is constructed, and the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and corporate performance is enriched and extended to include executive competency, which provides a theoretical foundation and empirical support for understanding and explaining entrepreneurial strategy in Chinese corporations. In terms of practical implications, this study helps entrepreneurial-orientated corporations to develop a proper human resources management system to recruit, evaluate, train and develop executives, resulting in continuous performance improvement.

This chapter presents systematic evidence on the persistent power of guanxi, the Chinese phrase for informal social relations and networks, in transitional China. I draw heavily on my previous publications reporting findings from a series of probability sample surveys of the Job-Search Network (thereafter JSNET) project in Chinese cities, and job histories of the survey respondents combined cover a span of 37 years from 1978, the beginning year of China's market-oriented reforms, to 2014, the year of last JSNET survey completed.

In the field of public relations and communication management, message evaluation has been one of the starting points for evaluation and measurement research at least since the 1970s. Reliable and valid message evaluation has a central role in message effects research and campaign design in other disciplines as well as communication science. The purpose of this paper is to offer a message testing protocol to efficiently acquire valid and reliable message evaluation data.

A message testing protocol is described in terms of how to conceptualize and evaluate the content and format of messages, in terms of procedures for acquiring and testing messages and in terms of using efficient, reliable and valid measures of perceived message effectiveness (PME) and perceived argument strength (PAS). The evidence supporting the reliability and validity of PME and PAS measures is reviewed.

The message testing protocol developed and reported is an efficient, reliable and valid approach for testing large numbers of messages.

Researchers’ ability to select candidate messages for subsequent deeper testing, for various types of communication campaigns, and for research in theory testing contexts is facilitated. Avoiding the limitations of using a single instance of a message to represent a category (also known as the case-category confound) is reduced.

Communication campaign designers are armed with tools to assess messages and campaign concepts quickly and efficiently, reducing pre-testing time and resources while identifying “best-in-show” examples and prototypes.

Message structures are conceptualized in terms of content and format features using theoretically driven constructs. Measures of PAS and PME are reviewed for their reliability, construct and predictive validity, finding that the measures are acceptable surrogates for actual effectiveness for a wide variety of messages and applications. Coupled with procedures that reduce confounding by randomly nesting messages within respondents and respondents to messages, the measures used and protocol deployed offer an efficient and utilitarian approach to message testing and modeling.

Using suspended nanoparticles in the base fluid is known as one of the most efficient ways for heat transfer augmentation and improving the thermal efficiency of various heat exchangers. Different types of nanofluids are available and used in different applications. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of using hybrid nanofluid and number of plates on the performance of plate heat exchanger. In this study, TiO₂/water single nanofluid and TiO₂-Al₂O₃/water hybrid nanofluid with 1% particle weight ratio have been used to prepare hybrid nanofluid to use in plate type heat exchangers with three various number of plates including 8, 12 and 16.

The experiments have been conducted with the aim of examining the impact of plates number and used nanofluids on heat transfer enhancement. The performance tests have been done at 40°C, 45°C, 50°C and 55°C set outlet temperatures and in five various Reynolds numbers between 1,600 and 3,800. Also, numerical simulation has been applied to verify the heat and flow behavior inside the heat exchangers.

The results indicated that using both nanofluids raised the thermal performance of all tested exchangers which have a various number of plates. While the major outcomes of this study showed that TiO₂-Al₂O₃/water hybrid nanofluid has priority when compared to TiO₂/water single type nanofluid. Utilization of TiO₂-Al₂O₃/water nanofluid led to obtaining an average improvement of 7.5%, 9.6% and 12.3% in heat transfer of heat exchangers with 8, 12 and 16 plates, respectively.

In the present work, experimental and numerical analyzes have been conducted to investigate the influence of using TiO₂-Al₂O₃/water hybrid nanofluid in various plate heat exchangers. The attained findings showed successful utilization of TiO₂-Al₂O₃/water nanofluid. Based on the obtained results increasing the number of plates in the heat exchanger caused to obtain more increment by using both types of nanofluids.

The purpose of this paper is to check the reliability and validity of a well-acknowledged scale developed by Pratibha A. Dabholkar (1996) in the context of Indian organized grocery retail and also to identify new aspects of service quality with respect to grocery retail from literature that have not been taken into account in earlier studies and to finally develop a new scale to measure service quality of organized retail grocery stores with consultation from several experts.

In order to achieve the objectives of the research, both descriptive and exploratory research designs have been employed such that a survey of 800 respondents was undertaken as part of descriptive research whereas exploratory research was conducted to add new dimensions to the existing service quality measurement model so as to develop a new comprehensive scale.

The results of the study suggest that all the five dimensions of Dabholkar’s model are not suitable to measure service quality in Indian organized grocery retail stores. Therefore, a new instrument with total four dimensions has been developed.

The study is of great importance for the retailers as it offers a more comprehensive and specific scale to measure service quality of organized grocery retail stores.

This research supports and makes contribution to the previous research on development of service quality measurement scales in Indian context.

The overall objective of this research is to “explore whether shock advertising has a long-lasting positive effect on the smoking cessation among smoking Jordanians in a country where smoking is a deep-rooted social norm.”

This research is an exploratory qualitative research. A purposeful sampling technique was used to select participants from a mall intercept and randomly divided into groups of seven. Each group was interviewed in two different focus group sessions (four weeks apart). All focus groups were audio-recorded, transcribed and analyzed using thematic analysis.

A total of 41 participants took part in the focus group session. Most participants were smokers or second-hand smokers. “Three overarching themes were generated from the focus groups: previous anti-smoking campaign experience, shock advertising (SA) impact and drawbacks of SA. All participants reported that they have never been exposed to shocking adverts, and the shock appeal has never been applied in any of the anti-smoking or health awareness campaigns in Jordan. This research revealed that incorporating images of children with a mixture of emotional and fear appeals is effective in targeting Jordanian parents' negative consumptive behaviors, which may harm other individuals, especially children. Moreover, most participants commented that the effects of shock adverts would be very short term and would not likely change behaviors”.

This research contributes both “theoretically and practically to the value and effectiveness of shock advertising. This research area is overlooked in MENA countries, particularly Jordan”.