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Using the moral responsibility theory of corporate sustainability (MRCS) framework , the study examined Chinese textile and apparel (T&A) manufacturers' moral duty positions, goals and structures toward sustainability, with a goal of creating a spectrum of corporate sustainability (CS) performance.

An online survey method was employed to investigate participants' views on their companies' perceptions, goals and structures toward each of the listed sustainability-related activities.

The results showed that all participants expressed their companies have moral responsibilities toward some aspects of sustainability. Particularly, they viewed that their companies emphasize labor relations (LR) and righteous operation (RO) activities over environmental protection (EP) or public welfare involvement (PW) activities when fulfilling their sustainability responsibilities. After analyzing each response by following MRCS, 41 companies were categorized as occasionally sustainability corporations. The remaining 259 responses were categorized as consistently sustainability corporations in selective areas.

The study for the first time revealed the sustainability-related activities that most respondents in Chinese T&A manufacturing industry perceived as perfect or imperfect duties. Findings add knowledge to the area of corporate moral responsibility toward sustainability and show a spectrum of Chinese textile and apparel manufacturers' sustainability performance, empirically supporting MRCS.

Do corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices necessarily increase their social capital? The key to answering this question lies in understanding the impact of the interactive behavior of CSR and social capital on the sustainable operation and development of enterprises. This paper finds that existing studies cannot accurately describe the inherent interaction between CSR and social capital, and the results verified by econometric models are often abstract and do not adequately reflect the actual business situation of enterprises.

This article tries to make a breakthrough in two aspects: the article identifies the common practice object of CSR and social capital by using the “stakeholder” mechanism and puts forward the hypothesis of the relationship between CSR and social capital by observing the interaction behavior between enterprises and stakeholders; based on the perspective of sustainable development, the article proposes the elements of “trust, norm and rationality,” analyzes the behavioral choices of enterprises in social responsibility practice and social capital accumulation and clarifies the inherent relationship between them.

The article points out the impact of the multifaceted nature of the relationship between CSR practices and social capital enrichment on the sustainable development of enterprises and proposes that manufacturing enterprises in transformation and innovation should be analyzed using an objective position rather than value judgment.

This paper synthesizes the assessment data from the questionnaire, interview data and sustainability analysis to answer the questioning of existing research: CSR does not necessarily increase corporate social capital, and the relationship between the two is complex and multifaceted, depending on the specific target and business state of the company. The focus of this paper is to analyze in detail the three relationship assumptions that form when companies interact with their stakeholders, based on the sustainability perspective of “trust,” “norms” and “rationality.”

To explore the state of this conditional Granger causality when other cities are not factors, we investigate housing market networks in China's major cities by using a combination of conditional Granger causality and network analysis.

Although housing market networks have been well discussed for different countries, the question of housing market networks in China's major cities based on the conditional causality perspective has yet to be answered.

We discover that second-tier cities are more influential than first-tier cities. Although the connectivity of the primary housing market is more complex than the diversified connectivity observed in the secondary housing market, both markets are scale-free networks that exhibit high stability. Moreover, we reveal that geographic conditions and economic development jointly determine the housing market's modular hierarchical structure. Our results provide meaningful information for both Chinese policymakers and investors.

By excluding the influence of other cities, our conditional Granger causality identifies the true casual relation between cities' housing markets. Moreover, it is the first paper to consider the primary housing market and secondary housing market separately. Specifically, Chinese prefer new house rather than second-hand house from both speculative and self-housing. Generally speaking, the new house price is lower than the second-hand house price since the new house is off-plan property. Therefore, understanding the difference between primary and secondary housing markets will provide useful information for both policymakers and speculators.

This study explores whether and how four main factors of short-branded video content (content matching, information relevance, storytelling and emotionality) facilitate consumer engagement (likes, comments and shares), as well as the moderating effect of the release time (morning, afternoon and evening) in such relationships.

This study uses Python to write programs to crawl relevant data information, such as consumer engagement and short video release time. It combines coding methods to empirically analyze the impact of short-branded video content characteristics on consumer engagement. A total of 10,240 Weibo short videos (total duration: 238.645 h) from 122 well-known brands are utilized as research objects.

Empirical results show that the content characteristics of short videos significantly affected consumer engagement. Furthermore, the release time of videos significantly moderated the relationship between the emotionality of short videos and consumer engagement. Content released in the morning enhanced the positive impact of warmth, excitement and joy on consumer engagement, compared to that released in the afternoon.

The findings provide new insights for the dissemination of products and brand culture through short videos. The authors suggest that enterprises that use brand videos consider content matching, information relevance, storytelling and emotionality in their design.

From a broader perspective, this study constructs a new method for comprehensively evaluating short-branded video content, based on four dimensions (content matching, information relevance, storytelling and emotionality) and explores the value of these dimensions for creating social media marketing success, such as via consumer engagement.

The influence of the cam angular speed on the pressure, film thickness and temperature profiles at some selected angular positions together with the oil characteristics are investigated.

A high-order polynomial cam is used, and thermal elastohydrodynamic lubrication (EHL) calculations are carried out by the multi-grid method and line-line scanning technique.

It is found that the film thickness decreases with a decrease in angular speed. The depth of the dimple that occurred in the reverse motion is also reduced because of the recession in the “temperature–viscosity wedge” effect.

It is revealed that the reduction in the cam angular speed makes the classical big surface dimple evolve into a small centralized dimple during the opposite sliding motion.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/ILT-08-2019-0327

Metaverse, that is extended reality (XR)-based technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), are increasingly believed to facilitate fundamental human practice in the future. One of the vanguards of this development has been the consumption domain, where the multi-modal and multi-sensory technology-mediated immersion is expected to enrich consumers' experience. However, it remains unclear whether these expectations have been warranted in reality and whether, rather than enhancing the experience, metaverse technologies inhibit the functioning and experience, such as cognitive functioning and experience.

This study utilizes a 2 (VR: yes vs no) × 2 (AR: yes vs no) between-subjects laboratory experiment. A total of 159 student participants are randomly assigned to one condition — a brick-and-mortar store, a VR store, an AR store and an augmented virtuality (AV) store — to complete a typical shopping task. Four spatial attention indicators — visit shift, duration shift, visit variation and duration variation — are compared based on attention allocation data converted from head movements extracted from recorded videos during the experiments.

This study identifies three essential effects of XR technologies on consumers' spatial attention allocation: the inattention effect, acceleration effect and imbalance effect. Specifically, the inattention effect (the attentional visit shift from showcased products to the environmental periphery) appears when VR or AR technology is applied to virtualize the store and disappears when AR and VR are used together. The acceleration effect (the attentional duration shift from showcased products to the environmental periphery) exists in the VR store. Additionally, AR causes an imbalance effect (the attentional duration variation increases horizontally among the showcased products).

This study provides valuable empirical evidence of how VR and AR influence consumers' spatial bias in attention allocation, filling the research gap on cognitive function in the metaverse. This study also provides practical guidelines for retailers and XR designers and developers.

This study aims to present the discrepancy in oil film distribution in reciprocating motion experimentally with zero entraining velocity (ZEV) on a conventional ball-disk test rig with oil lubrication.

Driven independently by two individual servomotors, a steel ball and a sapphire disc move at equal speed but in opposite directions in a triangle wave. The oil film images between the ball and the disc were recorded by a camera. After the experiments, the mid-section film thickness was evaluated by using a dichromatic interference intensity modulation approach.

The dimpled oil film in transient condition is shallower than that at steady state with the same load and velocities, and the transient dimple depth decreases with the decrease of time. The increase of the applied load offers a beneficial effect on lubrication. Boundary slippage happens in ZEV reciprocating motion. The slippage at the interface is related to the transient effect and applied load.

This study reveals the significant difference of the oil film variation in ZEV reciprocating motion, especially the complex boundary slippage at the interface of the oil and the sapphire disc.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/ILT-01-2020-0021

This paper aims to study different morphology Cu₆Sn₅ effect on Babbitt alloy tribological properties.

Different morphology Cu₆Sn₅ of Babbitt was conducted by different cooling modes. Bare Babbitt was marked by Babbitt-0, Babbitt modified by first cooling mode (marked by Babbitt-1) and Babbitt modified by second cooling mode (marked by Babbitt-2). The microstructure and microhardness of specimens were tested. Then, tribological properties of Babbitt-0, Babbitt-1 and Babbitt-2 were performed by reciprocating mode under lubricated condition.

The results showed that shape Cu₆Sn₅ of Babbitt was changed from mixed needle and star-like shape to short rod-like or granular shape. The microhardness of Babbitt-1 was highest than that of Babbitt-0 and Babbitt-2. Compared with Babbitt-0 and Babbitt-2, tribological properties of Babbitt-1 were better under lubricated condition due to short rod-like and sparse distribution of Cu₆Sn₅. Moreover, the simulation result of strain and stress of Babbitt-1 was lowest than that of Babbitt-0 and Babbitt-2.

Different morphology (shape and distributed) of Cu₆Sn₅ was obtained by different cooling modes. Modulated different forms of Cu₆Sn₅ around SnSb was beneficial to improve Babbitt alloy tribological properties.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a novel process of integral ceramic molds for investment casting of hollow turbine blades.

At first, a resin pattern of a hollow turbine blade prototype is fabricated by stereolithography (SL). And then aqueous gelcasting process is utilized to fill the resin pattern with ceramic slurry of low viscosity and low shrinkage, through in situ polymerization of the slurry a ceramic mold is formed. At last, the ceramic mold for investment casting of hollow turbine blade is obtained by vacuum drying, pyrolyzing and sintering.

An integral ceramic mold is successfully fabricated by combining SL and gelcasting process, cores and shell are connected with each other and thus high relative position accuracy is guaranteed. Properties of integral ceramic mold at room temperature and high temperature satisfy the requirements of directional casting for complex‐shaped thin‐walled blades.

Because the integral ceramic mold is a close body, it is very difficult to directly measure its inner dimensions and the relative position accuracy of cores and shell, and the further research is needed.

This method enhanced the versatility of using SL prototype in the fabrication of integral ceramic mold for investment castings. Although this paper took a hollow turbine blade as an example, this method is also capable of fabricating integral ceramic molds for other complex investment castings.

In recent years, there has been significant interest in adopting XR (extended reality) technologies such as VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality), particularly in retail. However, extending activities through reality-mediation is still mostly believed to offer an inferior experience due to their shortcomings in usability, wearability, graphical fidelity, etc. This study aims to address the research gap by experimentally examining the acceptance of metaverse shopping.

This study conducts a 2 (VR: with vs. without) × 2 (AR: with vs. without) between-subjects laboratory experiment involving 157 participants in simulated daily shopping environments. This study builds a physical brick-and-mortar store at the campus and stocked it with approximately 600 products with accompanying product information and pricing. The XR devices and a 3D laser scanner were used in constructing the three XR shopping conditions.

Results indicate that XR can offer an experience comparable to, or even surpassing, traditional shopping in terms of its instrumental and hedonic aspects, regardless of a slightly reduced perception of usability. AR negatively affected perceived ease of use, while VR significantly increased perceived enjoyment. It is surprising that the lower perceived ease of use appeared to be disconnected from the attitude toward metaverse shopping.

This study provides important experimental evidence on the acceptance of XR shopping, and the finding that low perceived ease of use may not always be detrimental adds to the theory of technology adoption as a whole. Additionally, it provides an important reference point for future randomized controlled studies exploring the effects of technology on adoption.