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This study explores the influencing factors on organizational efficiency of the smart logistics ecological chain, and designs the corresponding theoretical framework to guide the practice of enterprises

A multi-case study method is adopted in this study. It includes four companies A, B, C and D in China as the case study objects, collects data through enterprise survey and uses the combination of open coding and spindle coding to process the data. By testing the reliability and validity, the theoretical framework is summarized.

First, organizational efficiency in smart logistics ecological chains is directly related to their service and technology innovation capability. Second, symbiotic relationships, information sharing and customer demand affect the efficiency of smart logistics multi-case ecological chains by influencing their service capacity; their technological innovation capability regulates the mechanism of influence. Third, technological innovation in smart logistics ecological chains positively impacts their service capabilities. Improving technological innovation capability can enhance logistics service capabilities.

According to the characteristics of smart logistics, the theoretical framework about organizational efficiency of smart logistics ecological chain is constructed, which fills the research gap and can provide interesting perspectives for the future research related to the smart logistics ecological chain. At the same time, the findings can also help enterprises to better build the smart logistics ecological chain in practice.

This study explores the influencing factors of smart logistics ecological chain's (SLEC's) organizational collaboration and designs a corresponding conceptual framework.

The multi-case study is applied to this paper. Specifically, this study is a combination of exploratory and explanatory case studies.

The findings are threefold. First, empowerment capability and the information-sharing level are unique factors that affect SLEC's organizational collaboration. Second, greater empowerment capability stimulates the increase of information-sharing level. Third, emerging digital technology, personalized demand and peer competition affect the degree of SLEC's organizational collaboration through an intermediary variable – empowerment capability. Specifically, the emerging digital technology application and peer competition degrees have positive effects on empowerment capability, while the demand personalization degree negatively (positively) affects empowerment capability in the short (long) term.

As an important part of supply chain performance, organizational collaboration is receiving more attention. However, in the smart economy context, no theoretical framework exists for analyzing factors that affect the organizational collaboration degree of SLEC. This study fills this gap.

This study aimed to bibliometrically and visually analyze and review hospitality and tourism marketing studies published from 2000–2020.

A total of 3,942 articles collected from the databases of Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-E) in the Web of Science (WoS) along with their references were used for analyses. The bibliometric software HistCiteTM and literature measurement visualization tools, VOSviewer and CiteSpace, were employed to analyze the selected articles.

The results of the study demonstrated top influential scholars and institutions, intellectual structure and emerging trends of the study topics, and future research opportunities in the field of hospitality and tourism marketing.

First, academic influence of a scholar was evaluated by citations of his/her publications, which did not take the order of authorship into consideration. Second, this study was restricted to the English language journals. Third, other types of published documents related to the studied field such as review papers were not considered by this research.

In comparison to traditional qualitative analysis such as content analysis, bibliometric analysis is a more objective approach to vividly demonstrate trends and performance of a research field, offers unique insights for its advancement with wider inclusiveness of a larger amount of data.

This paper aims to investigate the correlation between wear behavior and microstructure evolution in friction-induced deformation layers (FDL) of 30CrMnSi steel, especially the role of strain-hardening induced by plastic deformation in FDL, which accordingly alters the wear behavior.

Dry sliding friction and wear behaviors of the 30CrMnSi steel against quenched and tempered GCr15 steel were studied using a pin-on-disc tester. The microstructure, hardness and plastic deformation of FDL were investigated.

It was found that the evolution of microstructure and strain-hardening induced by plastic deformation were occurred in the subsurface. When the microstructure, hardness and depth of the plastic deformation layer (PDL) reached a relatively steady state, the friction process transformed into stable-state stage. The wear loss and depth of the PDL was in dynamic equilibrium at stable wear stage.

In this paper, the correlation among the microstructure evolution, the strain-hardening and wear behavior were systemically analyzed. This paper could provide a theoretical reference for optimizing the microstructure and strain hardening properties of tribo-pairs materials.

In the context of global economic downturn and intense competition, firms are increasingly resorting to supply chains to acquire capital support and achieve sustainability. This study aims to investigate the effect of supply chain finance (SCF) on corporate sustainability performance (CSP) and identifies SCF-related recipes for CSP.

Based on a sample of 1,038 firms that disclose CSP – namely, corporate financial performance (CFP) and environmental, social and governance performance (ESGP) – the authors use a quasi-replication method consisting of empirical analysis with fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to investigate SCF’s effects on CSP.

The authors find that SCF has a “doing well by doing good” effect on CSP. CFP can promote the positive effect of SCF and ESGP while ESGP’s positive effect on SCF and CFP is nonsignificant. In addition, heterogeneity tests show that SCF’s promoting effect on CSP is affected by high-low CFP and ESGP. The fsQCA results verify the empirical findings and reveal five SCF-related recipes for achieving high CSP.

This study has the following two limitations. First, we do not consider how SCF affects CSP in different industries. There is a need to investigate whether industry heterogeneity changes SCF’s effects on CSP, especially in prominent industries, such as the energy industry, with its high susceptibility to ESGP, and the manufacturing industry, with its extensive application of SCF. It will be important to investigate these industries to better understand SCF’s role in sustainability. Second, we study the secondary supply chain – namely, core firm–suppliers and core firm–customers. The authors do not consider financial institutions (e.g. banks and guarantee institutions). SCF modes that include the participation of financial institutions, such as factoring financing and reverse factoring financing, cater more to the capital needs of diversified firms. In the future, studying specific industries that have made significant contributions to the application of SCF along with others that are more sensitive to environmental governance could better highlight the effect of SCF on sustainability and help supply chain managers understand the application value of SCF. Future research could also extend SCF participants into multiple roles to explore separate effects. Tracking financing demanders, fund providers and credit guarantors could capture SCF characteristics more comprehensively. Methodologically, it will be challenging to accurately measure SCF networks in terms of quantification. In future work, this could be performed with the help of artificial intelligence.

First, our findings indicate that SCF has a “doing well by doing good” effect on core firms. SCF can not only overcome the capital shortage of SMEs but also provide significant benefits to core firms. Second, our findings provide SCF-related recipes to help firms fulfil ESGP obligations without sacrificing CFP under the pressure to “do good.” The authors provide valuable insights and diverse recommendations to help supply chain managers, marketing executives and researchers adjust supply chain management strategies. Third, this work can guide executives in various fields to adopt SCF to achieve sustainability as a risk-mitigation strategy by means of marketing.

This study identifies better, more straightforward SCF-related recipes for CSP (consisting of CFP and ESGP) using a quasi-replication analysis that improves upon conventional methods such as regression analysis, which have limited power. The authors provide valuable insights and diverse recommendations to help managers pursue sustainable development. The findings point to practical guidelines and feasible solutions that can support well-founded operational strategic and management decision-making, which can enhance a firm’s competitiveness under uncertainty and a sluggish economy.

Decision theory holds that the ambiguity of decision information affects the choices of decision makers, who have the emotion of “ambiguity aversion” when making fuzzy decisions. The purpose of this paper is to explore the neural mechanism how the information ambiguity of different sales promotion strategies influences consumers’ purchasing decision.

The paper uses the event-related potential (ERP) technique and experiment.

Results indicate that the information ambiguity of sales promotion strategies did influence the purchasing decision of consumers, and there were significant differences in the amplitudes of brain wave P2, N2 and P3 when consumers encountered the sales promotions of different types (discounts and gift-giving). This reflects the difference in perceived risk, decision-making conflict and decision-making attitude. It means that compared with discounts, the perceived risk and difficulty increased while the decision-making confidence plunged when consumers were faced with gift-giving promotions. This finding gives an explanation on the neural level why consumers prefer discounts, rather gift-giving sales promotions.

For the merchants to promote commodities online, it is suggested that the actual benefit from the sales promotion should be specified to reduce the ambiguity of sales promotion information. As the neuromarketing develops, merchants have obtained more effective approaches to study marketing strategies.

One of the theoretical contributions this paper made is that the authors innovatively explored the consumer’s preference to online sales promotion strategies from the perspective of fuzzy decision. Second, the authors adopted the ERP technique to study the influence of the ambiguity of sales promotion information on the consumer’s purchasing behaviors. Third, this study provides an explanation for why consumers prefer the sales promotion type of discounts according to the neural mechanism of decision making.

The increasing use of social media after work hours for work purposes, termed social media connectivity (SMC), is an emerging phenomenon in supply chain management. Although SMC can have debilitating effects on supply chain professionals and their organizations, research on its effects on work-related attitudes, especially turnover intentions, remains largely unexplored. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of SMC on voluntary turnover of supply chain professionals and the resulting implications for them and their organizations.

The study draws from the conservation of resources theory and the concept of information overload to explain how SMC leads to emotional exhaustion and impacts turnover intentions of supply chain professionals, contingent on work–life balance. The model is tested using survey data (n=325) collected at multiple times from a large Chinese pharmaceutical manufacturer and distributor with spatially dispersed workforce and distribution facilities.

The results confirm that emotional exhaustion mediates the association between SMC and turnover intentions and that SMC exacerbates the intentions of supply chain professionals to quit their jobs. However, work–life balance is found to dampen the exhausting effects of SMC on emotional exhaustion thereby reducing its debilitating effects on turnover intentions of supply chain professionals.

The focus on SMC highlights the need for greater understanding of the dark side of social media on supply chain professionals and their organizations and how SMC can be better managed in an age of social media ubiquity.

Building on social identity theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine how European managers construct their multiple identities after being acquired by a Chinese firm and to determine the key factors contributing to the changing dynamics of multiple organizational identities.

The paper presents a qualitative, single case study of a Chinese acquisition of a European manufacturing firm at two points in time.

We find that multiple identities initially trigger ambivalence toward the acquisition, but over time, the ambivalence diminishes. The reduction of ambivalence results from concurrent integration and separation: a newly constructed boundary spanning the organization separates positive identities from negative ones, and integration interventions foster the development of a new, shared identity.

The findings reveal that organizational identity change is facilitated by the aligning of a post-merger identity with the acquired organization's historical identity and by creating an ambivalent boundary spanning identity.

Ethnic minorities (EMs), who make up a sizable proportion of multilingual users, are more likely to browse and search in their native language. It is helpful to identify multilingual users' information needs to provide public digital cultural services (PDCS) for making their life better.

The in-context interview is an efficient way to explore EMs' information needs and evoke their daily experience with PDCS. The material from 31 one-on-one interviews with EMs in China was recorded and analyzed using thematic analysis.

The findings reveal that language proficiency is a critical factor influencing multilingual information access (MLIA) and multilingual users' information needs. Moreover, language ability, digital literacy and cultural literacy are important components of multilingual information literacy (MLIL), which is helpful for EMs to access PDCS. In light of Kochen's theory, the information needs of PDCS can be classified into the aroused need of resources, the recognized need of functions and services and expressed need. For the expressed need, it is necessary to develop a one-stop convergence platform of PDCS to process various requests of resources, functions and services in the future.

The findings will be valuable for governments, public institutions and social organizations in identifying, addressing and resolving these issues about PDCS.

Metaverse is a virtual application spawned by digital technology that is becoming increasingly relevant to our lives. However, for the opportunities created and challenges posed by the metaverse, its important elements and future evolution trend remain largely unknown. Thus, this paper aims to understand the current status of metaverse research and its future research directions.

Based on the analysis of the literature data on the metaverse both in English and Chinese using Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling and bibliometrics, this study discussed the related research and development trend of the metaverse. The authors first defined the concept of the metaverse and analyzed 1,378 English articles from seven publishers and 590 Chinese articles from the CNKI database. Following that, the authors summarized three important themes from the current studies: virtual world, metaverse technologies and metaverse applications. Finally, a framework of future directions on metaverse research was proposed.

The review found that during the rapid development of the metaverse, opportunities and challenges coexisted. In the virtual world, metaverse technologies drive the implementation of application scenarios, and in turn, applications promote the improvement of technologies. The interrelationship between technology and application lays the foundation for the development of the metaverse. Future metaverse research will generate different research directions.

This review provides a valuable, systematic perspective for individuals who want to understand the metaverse. The conceptual framework on metaverse research proposed in this paper offers a comparison of literature analysis from domestic and international perspectives and brings new insights into the development of the metaverse.