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This paper reconsiders the approaches to measuring Confucian values, and tests their association with workforce performance. The purpose of this paper is to examine how such values and performances are prioritized across three East Asian societies, but more importantly, identifies how variations across societies might result from the way in which Confucianism has been transformed/appropriated differently across history.

A Best-Worst experimental design is used to measure three aspects of Confucianism (relational, pedagogical, and transformative), and three aspects of workforce performance (mindset, organization, and process) to capture the trade-offs by respondents from three East Asian societies: China (n=274), Taiwan (n=264), and South Korea (n=254). The study employs analysis of variance with post-hoc tests to examine differences between societies. A hierarchical cluster analysis using Ward’s method is utilized to identify clusters based on similarities within the data. And last, multiple regression analysis is applied to determine the explanatory power of Confucian values on workforce performance.

Findings confirm the prioritization of three aspects of Confucianism (relational, pedagogical, and transformative) to differ between Mainland Chinese, Taiwan Chinese, and Korean respondents – producing five distinct clusters based on similarities across three societies. Overall, between 7 and 27 percent of the variance in workforce performance could be explained by the Confucian values included in this study.

This study highlights the “different shades of Confucianism” across East Asian societies, which we coin as Confucian Origin, Preservation, and Pragmatism, and demonstrates the need to take a multifaceted perspective in the measurement of Confucian culture. The study provides empirical support for the link between Confucianism and performance at the micro-level, as originally proposed by Baumann and Winzar (2017), and identifies specific antecedents of behavior for research moving forward.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationships between expenditure inequality and expenditure polarization in Indonesia during the post-reformation era in 2002–2012. It also explores the various dimensions of regional groups; and finds out in which dimension did the expenditure inequality and polarization occur in Indonesia during the period.

Gini index was employed to measure expenditure inequality and a number of developed polarization measurement was applied to investigate the linkage between inequality and polarization at national levels. It also applied a polarization index based on inequality decomposition to investigate how the polarization occurs in the regional dimension. It covered several groups of regional dimensions; those are rural and urban areas; eastern and western regions, as well as natural resource-rich provinces and non-natural resource-rich provinces.

This study found that expenditure inequality and polarization in Indonesia have moved in line, showing an increasing trend during the observation period. In the regional context, the greatest rise was in the region with low initial levels of expenditure inequality and polarization. The trends in each of the regional dimension showed a convergent pattern. It also showed that a significant portion of total polarization was attributed to expenditure differences between urban and rural areas rather than the other groups of regions.

The similar upward movement of expenditure inequality and polarization indicates that not only the differences between groups of expenditure are getting larger, but also the identification of the within groups expenditure are getting stronger. Since the high degree of inequality and polarization are closely related to conflict among groups of communities, this finding is a strong message to the policymaker that the development process in Indonesia during 2002–2012 tended to encourage the creation of social instability.

This study provides an evaluation for further development of social economy in Indonesia.

This paper attempts to give an overview of the relationship between expenditure inequality and polarization in Indonesia during 2002–2012. It also tries to reveal in which regional dimension, expenditure inequality and polarization occurred in Indonesia during the mentioned period. The issues have not been examined in previous empirical studies in Indonesia.

This study aims to analyse the relationship between the internationalisation performance of the company and, on the one hand, the factors that determine the internationalisation strategy and, on the other hand, the factors considered as inducers of this internationalisation process. The purpose of this study is to relate the determinants and inducing factors of the internationalisation process with the performance of internationalised companies, trying to assess how these determinants and these factors contribute to better performance.

The authors sent out a questionnaire to Portuguese exporting companies, containing questions regarding determinant factors associated with both the characteristics of origin market and target market of the internationalisation process and internationalisation inducing factors. The questionnaire results were subjected to a regression analysis.

The results indicate a positive relationship with the characteristics of the domestic market, more specifically with the need to reduce and diversify risk and the need to win new markets and consumers. Regarding the characteristics of the foreign market, there is a positive relationship with the determinants: follow customers and favourable perspectives of growth in the new market. In relation to the internationalisation inducing factors, those factors that the entrepreneur recognises as the triggers of the internationalisation strategy, the researchers found the existence of a positive relationship with formal and informal contact networks, as well as specific employee skills, international experience and strong propensity for entrepreneurship and risk-taking.

This study presents some limitations. On the one hand, the fact that the authors used the questionnaires, which seemed to be the most adequate approach, brings as a drawback the reduced number of answers. Further collection is in order to increase the sample under study. On the other hand, the literature presents different approaches that may be tested as well as the possibility of including other types of variables that the researchers will address in future studies.

By analysing the relationship between company performance in the internationalisation process and the factors that determine and induce this internationalisation process, this study seeks to identify which factors entrepreneurs should favour and strengthen to obtain a better performance in the internationalisation process. In addition, the authors use the concept of inducing factors that represent the firm's characteristics that trigger the internationalisation strategy. In a complementary perspective, the authors intend to contribute to the identification of the factors that new Portuguese entrepreneurs should pay more attention to, when starting their internationalisation process and that will improve their performance.

This paper aims to examine the distinctiveness of South Korean social enterprises from a historical institutionalism perspective. From this perspective, the author focuses on the proactive roles played by the government in the process of emergence and formulation of social enterprises in South Korea. The author roots this paper in the concept of the developmental state and examines how this concept applies to newly emerging social enterprises in South Korea.

This paper first introduces the process of South Korean social enterprises’ emergence as an independent phenomenon. The author explains the process with a link to governmental actions, such as the introduction of public programs and government acts. Second, this paper introduces the concept of developmental state which captures the proactive role of the state in social, economic and political development in South Korea. Third, this paper applies the institutional framework proposed by Kerlin (2013) to see how the South Korean social enterprise model can be located from a comparative perspective and how the South Korean model can contribute to the expansion of the existing framework.

This paper finds that the state involvement in South Korea is a reflection of the historical path of the developmental state. The cross-comparison of South Korean social enterprises from a historical institutionalist approach finds that the South Korean case may contribute to the ongoing scholarly debate by suggesting taking a Weberian ideal type of an interventionist state into account for an extension of the proposed framework. This paper also uncovered the strategic approach of the South Korean Government in utilizing this public policy tool by adopting and combining existing social enterprise models.

This paper demonstrates the state’s intents to mobilize economic and societal resources as public policy intervention tools, which can be understood from a developmental state context. This role would be distinct when compared to those in Europe and the USA. This paper has a limitation to restrict its analytical scope to formally recognized social enterprises because it focuses on the role of the state in utilizing social enterprises for public policy agenda: social development and social welfare provision.

As a practical implication, this study might provide an insightful framework for South Korean public policy makers, outlining the contributions and limitations of state-led public policies associated with social enterprises. As seen in the historical path of governmental interventions, governmental public policies do not necessarily guarantee their sustainable community impacts without the consideration of private or nonprofit actors’ spontaneous involvements. The flip side of state-led interventions requires policy makers to become more cautious, as they address social problems with public policy intents.

The majority of current studies on social enterprises in South Korea mainly focus on reporting the quantitative increase in the number of registered social enterprises. Beyond this quantitative description of its achievement, this paper also provides a historical narration and philosophical background of this phenomenon. Additionally, it shows how this artificial government intervention in social enterprises could be accepted from a historical perspective and brought remarkable responses from the private and civil society sectors in South Korea.

Extant methods of product weakness detection usually depend on time-consuming questionnaire with high artificial involvement, so the efficiency and accuracy are not satisfied. The purpose of this paper is to propose an opinion-aware analytical framework – PRODWeakFinder – to expect to detect product weaknesses through sentiment analysis in an effective way.

PRODWeakFinder detects product weakness by considering both comparative and non-comparative evaluations in online reviews. For comparative evaluation, an aspect-oriented comparison network is built, and the authority is assessed for each node by network analysis. For non-comparative evaluation, sentiment score is calculated through sentiment analysis. The composite score of aspects is calculated by combing the two types of evaluations.

The experiments show that the comparative authority score and the non-comparative sentiment score are not highly correlated. It also shows that PRODWeakFinder outperforms the baseline methods in terms of accuracy.

Semantic-based method such as ontology are expected to be applied to identify the implicit features. Furthermore, besides PageRank, other sophisticated network algorithms such as HITS will be further employed to improve the framework.

The link-based network is more suitable for weakness detection than the weight-based network. PRODWeakFinder shows the potential on reducing overall costs of detecting product weaknesses for companies.

A quicker and more effective way would be possible for weakness detection, enabling to reduce product defects and improve product quality, and thus raising the overall social welfare.

An opinion-aware analytical framework is proposed to sentiment mining of online product reviews, which offer important implications regarding how to detect product weaknesses.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the process of knowledge transfer within social networks composed of a pool of experts, and newcomers whose aim is primarily to acquire new knowledge, such as communities of practice. The authors wish to understand which communication system and which information about others' knowledge should be provided to get to a better diffusion of knowledge.

Agent‐based models and social network analysis are used and many simulations are run, in which communication mode and information about others' knowledge are varied.

Results emphasize the part played by newcomers in the process of direct knowledge transfer. They constitute additional sources of knowledge and act as intermediaries. Results also show that in a process of indirect transfer of knowledge, they have only little influence on the process of individual learning. These results enable the authors to formulate some recommendations to facilitate knowledge transfer within a knowledge intensive community. Non‐hierarchical structures of communication should be preferred and the participation of newcomers in the activities of the community fully encouraged.

This paper combines agent‐based modelling and social networks analysis to investigate the field of knowledge transfer and enables the identification of the key elements in the process of knowledge diffusion within a community of practice. It thus provides some solution to eventual congestion problems in the access to the knowledge held within the community.