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This study aims to examine the problems of the concession system that Macao has long-term adopted to regulate its gaming industry and discuss alternatives.

Theoretical reflection was used to provide qualitatively different insights about governmental supervision of the gaming industry.

Two options for reform are proposed: (1) replace the concession system with a licensing system that does not restrict the number of concessionaires or the period of concession or (2) adopt a modified form of the concession system that changes the number of concessionaires, period of concessions and methods for selecting concessionaires.

This study’s results have implications for the Macao government and other gaming jurisdictions in Asia.

This study provides a comprehensive examination of the concession system for governmental supervision of the gaming industry.

This paper attempts to explain the phenomenon that Macau has a parliament (Legislative Assembly) and mass suffrage but no political parties.

This paper reviews the development process of “parliament – mass suffrage – political party” in Hong Kong and Macau and tries to explain why Macau does not have a party using comparative research methods.

The political party development of Hong Kong and Macau was influenced by both the (former) colonial power and China, and whether there were political parties in these two regions was the result of the game between China and the (former) colonial power. China hoped to limit the development of party politics in the two regions. Since Britain felt reluctant to cooperate with China, political parties in Hong Kong developed. At the same time, Portugal chose to defer to China, which led Macau not to have a political party.

Existing studies have yet to explain why there are no political parties in Macau, and this paper is the first attempt to do so.

Regarding human resource and labour relations management, academia focuses mainly on cities; however, rural areas are an integral part of China's economic structure. This study focuses on the movie projection industry in China's rural areas and explores how human resource practices (HRPs) are transformed and the labour process is reconstructed in digital transformation.

We adopt a case study of a rural movie projection company. The company's HRPs reconstructed the labour process of movie projection, and they have been promoted as national standards. Data were collected from in-depth interviews, files and observations.

Rural movie projection companies combine high-performance and paternalistic HRPs in the media industry's digital transformation. HRPs and digital technology jointly reconstruct the labour process. First, the HRPs direct labour process practices towards standardisation. Second, the digital supervision platform guides the control style from simple to technical, placing projectionists under pressure while increasing management efficiency. Third, rural movies made using digital technology have disenchanted rural residents. Accordingly, the conventional relationships between the “country and its citizens,” “individuals themselves,” and “models and individuals” have been removed, and a new relationship between “individuals themselves” is formed thanks to the novel HRPs.

This research plays a crucial role in exposing researchers to the labour process of rural movie projection, which is significant in China but often ignored by Western academia and advances the Chinese contextualisation of research on labour relations.

This study aims to examine differences in the perceived value of luxury as drivers of luxury purchase intentions between individualist and collectivist cultures (at a country level) and consumers of Muslim versus Christian religious backgrounds. Moreover, this study investigates how consumers’ acculturation to the global consumer culture (AGCC) impacts their perceived luxury values.

The authors conducted two online survey studies. The first study compares Muslim consumers in Kuwait versus Muslims consumers in the UK. The second study compares the UK Muslim sample to a UK Christian sample. The authors collected data from 600 and 601 respondents, respectively. Partial least square structural equation modeling was used to test this study’s research hypotheses.

The perceived personal values of luxury primarily drive consumers’ luxury purchase intentions. The hedonic value of luxury impacts luxury purchase intentions significantly more for Muslims in the UK than in Kuwait. No significant differences were observed between religions. Consumers’ AGCC exerts a positive impact on all included perceived luxury values and more strongly impacts perceived uniqueness for Muslims than for Christians.

The paper builds on an integrative luxury values framework to examine the impact of luxury values on consumers’ purchasing intentions by studying the moderating effect of culture and religion on these relationships. The study is partly set in Kuwait, an understudied country, and investigates a Muslim minority in the UK.

This study intends to explore the configuration that affects the active degree of written questions in the Macau Legislative Assembly.

This study takes the members elected by the sixth Legislative Assembly of Macau as samples and uses the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis method. Five conditional factors are discussed, including multiple concurrent factors and complex causal mechanisms, which lead to the difference in the active degree of written questions.

The main conclusions are as follows: (1) Not Serving in the government is a necessary condition for a high active degree of the written question, and (2) The driving mechanism of a high active degree of written question can be divided into two paths. Among them, direct election into the Legislative Assembly is the crucial factor.

Traditional research mainly uses quantitative research methods. This study uses qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), which is a hybrid method designed to bridge the qualitative (case-oriented) and quantitative (variable-oriented) research gap.

This chapter aims to explore the novelty and utility of political economy discourse, termed “neo-statism,” as an analytical lens for comparative research in higher education. Analysis is framed within the context of Hong Kong’s transition from a British colony to a Special Administrative Region under China’s sovereignty, and its shifting academic paradigms from a more or less spontaneous philosophy rooted in liberal capitalist economy to embracing neo-statism, which involves market-conforming and state-sponsored approaches to economic and social restructuring whereby the state regulates higher education in support of national integration and global power projection. The statist regulation depends heavily on its deployment of discursive legitimacy, strategic distribution of resources, organizational synergy, and elite cohesion articulated through higher education policy, research projects, and cross-border academic exchange and cooperation. The Hong Kong case suggests that comparative research in higher education should advance from the methodological aspects of the comparative approach to exploring wider theoretical spectrum, for understanding emerging politico-economic factors shaping academic paradigm in comparative contexts. Moreover, scholars who engage in the trendy internationalization in higher education should move beyond the logics of neo-liberalism, and pay closer attention to the new geopolitical realities that are changing the normative and interactive dimensions of international higher education at large.

This study analyzes how the notion of the people emerged in two (neo)liberal societies during the crisis in 2019: Hong Kong and Chile.

From a qualitative and comparative perspective, 131 middle-class individuals were interviewed during heightened contentious activity in Hong Kong and Chile. The interviews were analyzed based on Ruiz's model for sociological discourse analysis.

The study shows that in contexts strongly influenced by liberalism, the notion of “people” is not advertised antagonistically against the individual but as complementary, and to this end, it emphasizes the heterogeneity of repertoires or demands. The comparison of these two movements highlighted the importance of democratic institutions in shaping the outcomes and effectiveness of protests.

Enacting the National Security Law in Hong Kong and the mandatory blockade imposed by both governments in response to the COVID-19 pandemic required an adaptation in the design and execution of the interviews, adopting a hybrid format. The volatility that characterizes periods of political crisis requires longitudinal follow-up. This article does not capture but can be explored in associated research publications.

The research offers two significant contributions: it addresses the immediate context by conducting on-site research during the most significant contemporary crises in Hong Kong and Chile. Secondly, it problematizes the understanding of the people in liberal societies and proposes it as a complementary (and not antagonistic) concept to that of the individual.

Decentralised administrative arrangements and the active function of local government organisations are essential to tackle crisis effectively. Using Bangladesh as a case study, this paper examines the central and local government administrative arrangements during COVID-19 pandemic.

This study applies qualitative content analysis and interviews to explore the local government’s role in Bangladesh’s COVID-19 management by interviews of 18 participants including government officials, experts, non-government organisations (NGOs) representatives, and the general public. This paper also analysed academic papers, policy documents and other publicly available documents, including newspaper reports.

The Constitution of Bangladesh intensified the active participation of local government in each administrative unit through decentralised administrative management. This paper however reveals that the administrative arrangement during the COVID-19 pandemic in Bangladesh was primarily a centrally led system. The local government was not sufficiently involved, nor had it integrated into the planning and coordination process. This indicated the absence of active decentralised administration.

This study fills the research gap of the administrative pattern and local relations in COVID-19 management by exploring the local government’s role during the catastrophic situation and highlights the importance of decentralised administrative actions in managing the crisis.

Policing activities aim to provide a safe environment for tourists. With the recent major protests that have erupted around the world, and the novel use of excessive police force against protestors, people may wonder if the policing deployment is for destination safety or to deter tourists from visiting. This paper aims to investigate anti-police and pro-police attitudes and tourists' behavioural responses towards a popular destination experiencing an ongoing social movement.

Data were collected between December 2019 and January 2020 (during the social movement). An online survey with a snowball sampling method was adopted to reach international tourists who were aware of the social movement in Hong Kong.

The results revealed that an individual with an anti-police attitude was found to be related to cognitive and affective destination images and perceived risks while those holding a pro-police attitude were more concerned with destination images only. No significant correlation was found between attitudes towards policing and travel intention.

This research presents a first attempt to investigate the relationship between tourists' policing attitudes and their behavioural responses during an ongoing social movement in a popular destination city.

This chapter traces one student teacher's (Joan) experiences of learning to teach English as a second language in a cross-cultural context during a teaching practicum in Hong Kong. The school-based practicum is a core component of many initial teacher education programmes. During this induction period, usually an 8-week block, student teachers are placed in local schools to learn how to integrate theories into practice in real teaching situations. Specifically, I uncover how Joan grappled with the tensions and complexities of teaching young learners from a different cultural and linguistic background, in a small elementary school situated in the borderland between Hong Kong (an autonomous region of China) and Shenzhen (a province of Mainland China).

Critical incidents from Joan's practicum experiences were analysed to uncover how she dealt with the tensions and dilemmas in confronting difference and marginalising practices while learning to teach English as a second language (ESL) in the practicum school. Implications on how to develop initial teacher education programmes so that student teachers learning to teach across cultural contexts can be encouraged to explore, confront and ‘deal with the emotional terrain of understanding difference’ will be discussed (Boler & Zembylas, 2003, p. 123; Zembylas, 2010).