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New (post‐1949) Chinese local gazetteers are one of the major primary resources for contemporary China Studies in the field of history, social sciences, humanities and sciences. Major research libraries in North America have collected them; however, the research value of this series of publications has not yet fully explored. This paper aims at examining how new local gazetteers have been compiled, the scope of their content and research value, and how scholars have used them.

The paper explores the scope and importance of the new Chinese local gazetteers collection through reviewing relevant regulations, policies and guidelines regarding compilation of the new local gazetteers, and randomly examining over 30 provincial, city and county gazetteers.

The paper provides a detailed account of publishing history of this collection; rich and unique research information available; and approaches to collection development, including utilizing digitized gazetteers by Chinese governments.

The paper explores the development of new Chinese local gazetteers in a more systematic way and adds to the current literature on the unique research value this collection has to offer.

Web usage statistics are often used as a tool for assessing a Web site, despite some of their drawbacks. This paper attempts to evaluate a government publications library Web site by studying its usage statistics. It examines organization, including access, searchability, and structure, of electronic government information in subject directory format. This study reveals that a subject directory Web site is an important tool for distributing electronic government information, but it requires continuous development. The usage statistics are useful in monitoring search engine ranking, improving display, structure, and searchability.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects religious affiliation and commitment have on Southeast Asian young adults' intention to adopt Islamic mobile phone banking.

An online self‐administered survey was distributed to Southeast Asian young adults through convenience and snowball sampling and a total of 135 responses obtained.

The study found Islamic mobile phone banking to be a novelty service, with little consumer awareness and experience, especially among non‐Muslims. Religious affiliation and commitment were both effective segmentation strategies, as differences in adoption intention were found between Muslims and non‐Muslims, as well as devout and casually religious Muslims. Overall, devout Muslims were socially‐oriented with their adoption criteria whereas casually religious and non‐Muslims relied upon the utilitarian attributes.

The paper contributes to the existing mobile banking adoption literature by providing evidence of consumers' adoption intentions toward Islamic mobile phone banking. It also uses religious commitment in addition to affiliation as segmentation tools, an approach which has not been used in previous Islamic mobile banking research.

Term suggestion is a very useful information retrieval technique that tries to suggest relevant terms for users' queries, to help advertisers find more appropriate terms relevant to their target market. This paper aims to focus on the problem of using several semantic analysis methods to implement a term suggestion system.

Three semantic analysis techniques are adopted – latent semantic indexing (LSI), probabilistic latent semantic indexing (PLSI), and a keyword relationship graph (KRG) – to implement a term suggestion system.

This paper shows that using multiple semantic analysis techniques can give significant performance improvements.

The suggested terms returned from the system may be out of date, since the system uses a batch processing mode to update the training parameter.

The paper shows that the benefit of the techniques is to overcome the problems of synonymy and polysemy over the information retrieval field, by using a vector space model. Moreover, an intelligent stopping strategy is proposed to save the required number of iterations for probabilistic latent semantic indexing.

The purpose of this paper is to present exciting and innovative research questions in service operations that are aligned with eight key themes and related topics determined by the Journal of Service Management (JOSM) Service Operations Expert Research Panel. By offering a good number of such research questions, this paper provides a broad range of ideas to spur conceptual and empirical research related to service operations and encourage the continued creation of deep knowledge within the field, as well as collaborative research across disciplines that develops and incorporates insights from service operations.

Based on a Delphi study, described in the companion article, “Service Operations: What Have We Learned?,” the panel identified eight key research themes in service operations where leading-edge research is being done or has yet to be done (Victorino et al., 2018). In this paper, three or four topics within each theme are selected and multiple questions for each topic are proposed to guide research efforts. The topics and questions, while wide-ranging, are only representative of the many ongoing research opportunities related to service operations.

The field of service operations has many interesting research topics and questions that are largely unexplored. Furthermore, these research areas are not only increasingly integrative across multiple themes within operations but often transcend functional disciplines. This creates opportunities for ever more impactful research with a greater reach throughout the service system and suggests that service researchers, regardless of functional affiliation, can contribute to the ongoing conversation on the role of service operations in value creation.

Leveraging the collective knowledge of the JOSM Service Operations Expert Research Panel to expand on the research themes generated from the Delphi study, novel questions for future study are put forward. Recognizing that the number of potential research questions is virtually unlimited, summary questions by theme and topic are also provided. These questions represent a synopsis of the individual questions and can serve as a quick reference guide for researchers interested in pursuing new directions in conceptual and empirical research in service operations. This summary also serves as a framework to facilitate the formulation of additional research topics and questions.

This paper aims to report on a preliminary study of how professionally qualified immigrants from Hong Kong to Canada make sense of their experiences, particularly workplace opportunities.

The study is framed by a Critical Sensemaking approach, involving in-depth interviews with 12 informants from the Hong Kong Chinese community and discursive analysis (Foucault, 1979) of the local and formative contexts in which they are making sense of workplace opportunities.

The findings suggest that a dominant discourse of “integration” strongly influences the way that professionally qualified immigrants come to accept the unchallenged assumptions that the government is providing help for them to “get in”; and that ethnic service organizations are offering positive guidance to the immigrants’ workplace goals and opportunities. Immigrants’ identity and self-worth are measured by whether they “get in” – integrate – into so-called mainstream society. The effect of this hidden discourse has been to marginalize some immigrants in relation to workplace opportunities.

The interplay of structural (i.e. formative contexts and organizational rules), socio-psychological (i.e. sensemaking properties) and discursive contexts (e.g. discourses of immigration) are difficult to detail over time. The interplay – although important – is difficult to document and trace over a relatively short period of time and may, more appropriately lend itself to more longitudinal research.

This paper strongly suggests that we need to move beyond structural accounts to capture the voice and agency of immigrants. In particular, as we have tried to show, the sensemaking and sensemaking contexts in which immigrants find themselves provide important insights to the immigrant experience.

This paper suggests widespread policy implications, with a call for greater use of qualitative methods in the study of immigrant experience. It is suggested that policymakers need to move beyond uniform and structural approaches to immigration. How selected immigrants in context make sense of their experiences and how this can help to identify improved policies need to be understood.

This paper is original in going beyond both structural and psychological accounts of immigration. Through the developing method of Critical Sensemaking, the study combines a focus on structure and social psychology and their interplay. Thus, providing insights not only to the broad discriminatory practices that so-called non-White immigrants face in Canada (and likely other industrial societies) but how these are made sense of. The study is also unique in attempting to fuse sensemaking and discourse analysis to show the interaction between individual sensemaking in the context of dominant discourses.

This study aims at providing exploratory insights into the initiative and capabilities of Chinese SMEs to develop and utilize diverse networks to support internationalization. Such network development and utilization efforts are fundamental to the analysis and explanation of Chinese firms’ internationalization patterns and outcomes. Extending from the existing network studies in the Chinese context that generally put emphasis on strong‐tie and ethnic‐oriented networks, this paper investigates and explains explicitly the use and effects of both strong‐ and weak‐tie networks in the international development of Chinese SMEs. Indepth case studies on four rapidly internationalized Chinese SMEs are conducted. The case findings demonstrate that weak‐tie networks are essential to the firms’ business development in foreign markets; and were proactively developed and utilized in the course of the firms’ development. The cases also provide alternative perspectives to the beliefs and values underpinning strong‐tie networks presumed in existing literature. The findings draw attention to the changing business values and approaches of the Chinese firms aiming at developing internationally. Managerial implications concerning the significant influence of effective networking on internationalization are pinpointed.

Knowledge sharing culture and performance climate are organizational interventions used by organizations to influence and shape employees’ attitudes and behavior toward knowledge sharing. While each strategy directly influences employees to respond accordingly, the interplay between the incongruent objectives of these two strategies could lead to social dilemmas in knowledge sharing. This study aims to understand social dilemmas in knowledge sharing due to the interaction between knowledge sharing culture and performance climate.

An experimental study using the vignette technique was performed on 240 working adults. ANOVA was conducted to examine the interplay effect between knowledge sharing culture and performance climate on knowledge sharing intention.

Results showed that performance climate moderates the effect of knowledge sharing culture on employees’ knowledge sharing intention. The findings highlight the importance of having goal congruence between knowledge sharing culture and performance climate to minimize the social dilemmas in knowledge sharing.

This study develops a moderation model based on the theory of social dilemma to investigate the interaction between knowledge sharing culture and performance climate and enhance the theoretical validity and exactness of the knowledge sharing literature. The findings from this study provide theoretical insights and practical implications for social dilemmas in knowledge sharing, as well as the foundation for continuous research into knowledge sharing and people management practices that may have a strong influence on employees’ knowledge sharing behavior, attitude and performance.