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The national logistics policy report published by Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Tourism in 2011 proposes to establish international logistics strategy teams in 10 different regions around Japan to satisfy the increasing demand for advance transportation infrastructure and stay competitive in Asia Pacific. The globalization of world economies creates many opportunities as well as challenges for international logistics companies to gain more business chances in this changing environment. The purpose of this paper is to improve service quality of international logistics companies and explores the quality function deployment in terms of quality evaluation method. The logistics service is particularly characterized by offering a series of transport solution and including other logistics activities. The major customers of the logistics services are the industrial clients. The customer satisfaction is key managerial mission since the competitiveness is a growing issue in this industry. The quality function deployment is one of the unique procedures to expose the requirements of customer and transform them into managerial tasks by cross correlation analysis between requirements and technical measures. The empirical study is performed to investigate service quality of the logistics industry by focusing on a group of leading logistics companies.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a theoretical and empirical understanding of how social ties affect innovation behavior and new product performance in Turkey, which is an emerging economy where high levels of economic and political uncertainties exist.The authors examine whether innovation behavior binds the political and business ties of the firm to new product performance. They also examine if these effects are contingent on variations in the institutional environment and market environment.

Structural equation modeling and mediation analyses were used on a sample of 344 small- and medium-sized enterprises in Istanbul.

Business ties are positively related to exploratory innovation behavior and political ties hamper such behavior. The authors also show that government support hinders firms’ disruptive innovation while encouraging incremental innovation behavior. The authors further demonstrate that the positive and indirect relation of business ties to new product performance through exploratory and exploitative innovation is largely insensitive to changes in market and institutional environments. Political ties are negatively (positively) and indirectly related to new product performance through exploratory (exploitative) innovation.

Managers should choose the form of their personal interactions (political and/or business) based on the type of innovation that is being pursued. Additionally, managers should consider both the institutional environment and the market environment as important contingencies in their decision of whether to invest resources in developing social ties to build innovation behavior.

The authors offer a deeper perspective of how social ties in emerging economies affect new product performance by considering exploratory and exploitative innovation behavior as mediating mechanisms. These mediating effects are conditional on institutional and market environments.

Drawing on the literature on dynamic skills, this study builds upon and empirically tests a conceptual model that connects business and political ties, organizational unlearning, organizational learning and firm performance. Specifically, this study suggests that business ties enable and political ties inhibit organizational unlearning (i.e. regenerative dynamic capability), which may, in turn, affect exploratory (i.e. renewing dynamic capability) and exploitative (i.e. incremental dynamic capability) innovation behaviors of the firm. Thus, the purpose of this study is to offer a theoretical framework in which organizational unlearning and learning act as mediating mechanisms between business and political ties and firm performance.

Structural equation modeling and mediation analyzes were used on a sample of 302 small and medium-size enterprises in Turkey.

This study found that business ties enable organizational unlearning while political ties impede it. This study further demonstrates that business ties positively and political ties negatively relate to organizational learning through organizational unlearning. In addition, this study shows that political ties are mostly negatively and indirectly related to firm performance through organizational learning while business ties positively and indirectly relate to firm performance.

The findings demonstrate the critical role that personal networks play in organizational learning and firm performance. This study provides evidence to the need to recognize and evaluate the potential and undesirable impacts of political ties on cultivating innovation skills and firm performance. In addition, this study recommends managers to embrace the significance of organizational unlearning in strategic renewal, particularly as it applies to building renewing and incremental dynamic skills for enhanced firm performance.

This study offers a deeper perspective of the dissected relations of social ties in emerging economies to firm performance by considering organizational unlearning and learning behaviors as mediating mechanisms.

This study aims to build an integrated model for information technology (IT)/information system (IS) team exploration and exploitation innovation in the business-to-business (B2B) enterprise context by empirically investigating the mediating role of tacit-explicit knowledge co-creation and exploring the behavior approach of servant leaders for IT/IS team exploration-exploitation innovation.

The authors' analysis was supported by 182 enterprise-IT/IS teams (403 participants) in Taiwan. The authors used a questionnaire and Structural Equation Model (SEM)-SmartPLS to validate the development model. This study examines IT/IS exploration-exploitation innovation using a combination of quantitative survey research and qualitative case studies.

The specific roles of direct and mediating effects for two innovations of IT/IS team exploration and exploitation were investigated. The findings show a direct effect of knowledge creation (tacit and explicit) on IT/IS team exploration-exploitation innovation. Servant leader behavior positively influences tacit-explicit knowledge co-creation practices, IT/IS team exploration and exploitation. Moreover, knowledge creation (tacit and explicit) successfully mediates the correlation between servant leaders and IT/IS team innovations (for exploration and exploitation).

Managers, IT/IS consultants and enterprises at the executive level are suggested to encourage knowledge co-creation practices, both tacit and explicit to support their IT/IS team innovation. The greater the degree of explicit knowledge (i.e. socialization and internalization) and tacit knowledge creation (i.e. externalization and combination), the greater will be the opportunities for meeting the enterprise-IT/IS team exploration and exploitation innovation goals. The project manager may follow servant leadership behavior to promote effective knowledge co-creation process on the IT/IS team.

This effort contributes to greater and new understanding of how ambidexterity capability, tacit-explicit knowledge co-creation (mediators) and servant leaders for IT/IS team exploration-exploitation innovation in the B2B enterprise context and new foundations for future studies on a cross-enterprise IT/IS team. This research is also the first empirical effort to understand how a servant perspective leadership contributes through the knowledge co-creation process for IT/IS exploration-exploitation innovation.

This paper aims to investigate textual characteristics of customer reviews that motivate companies to respond (sentiment negativity and sentiment deviation) and how aspects of these company responses (response intensity, length and tailoring) affect subsequent customer review quality (comprehensiveness and readability) over time.

Leveraging a large data set from a leading app website (Shopify), the authors combine text mining, natural language processing (NLP) and big data analysis to examine the antecedents and outcomes of online company responses to reviews.

This study finds that companies are more likely to respond to reviews with more negative sentiment and higher sentiment deviation scores. Furthermore, while longer company responses improve review comprehensiveness over time, they do not have a significant influence on review readability; meanwhile, more tailored company responses improve readability but not comprehensiveness over time. In addition, the intensity (volume) of company responses does not affect subsequent review quality in either comprehensiveness or readability.

This paper expands on the understanding of online company responses within the digital marketplace – specifically, apps – and provides a new and broader perspective on the motivations and effects of online company responses to customer reviews. The study also extends beyond the short-term focus of prior works and adds to literature on long-term effects of online company responses to subsequent reviews. The findings provide valuable insights for companies (especially those with apps) to enhance their online communication strategies and customer engagement.

The purpose of this study is to reconcile the positive, non-significant and even negative effects of guanxi on firm performance from two aspects. First, it explores the linear and curvilinear relationships between guanxi and distinct performance dimensions. Second, it examines the moderating effects of both exchange-related behavioral risk (reflected by contract enforcement in this study) and market-related environmental risk (reflected by market turbulence in this study) on the above relationship.

Based on data for 206 samples collected from distributors of house furnishings, computers and their components, a moderated regression is used to test the hypotheses.

The empirical test generally supports the conceptual model and demonstrates three findings. First, guanxi has a linear, positive effect on financial performance and an inverted U-shaped effect on strategic performance. Second, contract enforcement decreases the effect of guanxi on financial performance and enhances its effect on strategic performance. Third, market turbulence enhances the effect of guanxi on financial performance and weakens its effect on strategic performance.

First, this study collects data only from China. Future studies should collect data from other emerging markets to allow for either model validation or cross-country comparisons. Second, the data come only from buyers, and suppliers’ viewpoints are not included. Third, in addition to contract enforcement and market turbulence, other important contingencies should be considered in the guanxi–performance link.

The results provide important implications for managers to manage guanxi in an emerging economy. Managers should be very clear about their primary goal (i.e. pursuing short-term financial revenue or long-term strategic targets); next, they should understand how to match guanxi with various levels of contract enforcement and market turbulence to achieve that goal.

First, prior research has documented guanxi’s role in channel relationships, but it has not achieved consistent conclusions. Second, although existing studies have analyzed the contingencies of guanxi at the firm level, market level and institutional level, another important contingency “the dyadic relationship condition” is rarely considered. Third, although the extant research has realized the value of guanxi contingent on various market conditions, conflicting views exist. This study contributes by addressing these issues.

This paper aims to investigate how to improve new product performance in turbulent circumstances of emerging economies.

This paper used regression analysis to examine the performance impact of customer relationship management (CRM) and product development management (PDM) concentration strategy in new product development (NPD). A detailed contingent analysis of the market and institutional environments in emerging economies is also conducted based on a survey of 114 Chinese high-tech manufacturers.

The research findings show that PDM has a stronger positive effect on new product performance than CRM in emerging economies and that the contingent effects of the market and institutional environment vary. More specifically, technological turbulence and enforcement inefficiency can positively moderate the relationship between CRM and new product performance, whereas the moderating effect of market turbulence on CRM is negative. Meanwhile, enforcement inefficiency negatively moderates the effect of PDM on new product performance, while the moderating effect of market turbulence on PDM is positive.

This paper is limited to a survey of high-tech manufacturing enterprises in China. Further research should continues to explore and document the strategic issue about NPD in emerging economies by longitudinal study.

This paper contributed to theoretical and practical initiatives on the strategic issue of NPD and provided firms a further understanding of how to select the right NPD strategy in emerging economies to improve new product performance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how social value orientation and domain knowledge affect cooperation levels and transcription quality in crowdsourced manuscript transcription, and contribute to the recruitment of participants in such projects in practice.

The authors conducted a quasi-experiment using Transcribe-Sheng, which is a well-known crowdsourced manuscript transcription project in China, to investigate the influences of social value orientation and domain knowledge. The experiment lasted one month and involved 60 participants. ANOVA was used to test the research hypotheses. Moreover, inverviews and thematic analyses were conducted to analyze the qualitative data in order to provide additional insights.

The analysis confirmed that in crowdsourced manuscript transcription, social value orientation has a significant effect on participants’ cooperation level and transcription quality; domain knowledge has a significant effect on participants’ transcription quality, but not on their cooperation level. The results also reveal the interactive effect of social value orientation and domain knowledge on cooperation levels and quality of transcription. The analysis of the qualitative data illustrated the influences of social value orientation and domain knowledge on crowdsourced manuscript transcription in detail.

Researchers have paid little attention to the impacts of the psychological and cognitive factors on crowdsourced manuscript transcription. This study investigated the effect of social value orientation and the combined effect of social value orientation and domain knowledge in this context. The findings shed light on crowdsourcing transcription initiatives in the cultural heritage domain and can be used to facilitate participant selection in such projects.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the task design and assignment of full-text generation on mass Chinese historical archives (CHAs) by crowdsourcing, with special attention paid to how to best divide full-text generation tasks into smaller ones assigned to crowdsourced volunteers and to improve the digitization of mass CHAs and the data-oriented processing of the digital humanities.

This paper starts from the complexities of character recognition of mass CHAs, takes Sheng Xuanhuai archives crowdsourcing project of Shanghai Library as a case study, and makes use of the theories of archival science, including diplomatics of Chinese archival documents, and the historical approach of Chinese archival traditions as the theoretical basis and analysis methods. The results are generated through the comprehensive research.

This paper points out that volunteer tasks of full-text generation include transcription, punctuation, proofreading, metadata description, segmentation, and attribute annotation in digital humanities and provides a metadata element set for volunteers to use in creating or revising metadata descriptions and also provides an attribute tag set. The two sets can be used across the humanities to construct overall observations about texts and the archives of which they are a part. Along these lines, this paper presents significant insights for application in outlining the principles, methods, activities, and procedures of crowdsourced full-text generation for mass CHAs.

This study is the first to explore and identify the effective design and allocation of tasks for crowdsourced volunteers completing full-text generation on CHAs in digital humanities.

In this study, a three‐dimensional (3D) flow model is used to approximate the crystallinity gradients of slowly crystallizing polymers developed in the injection molding process. A generalized second order parallel splitting formula is constructed to achieve both the accuracy and efficiency of the computation. Calculated values of flow‐wise (flow‐thickness plane) and width‐wise (width‐thickness plane) crystallinity distributions are obtained and compared with experimental results. The structure‐oriented simulation method developed is not only capable of describing moldability parameters, but is also able to predict the characteristics of ultimate properties of the final products.