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This paper aims to investigate how different knitted structures affect the illuminative effect of polymeric optical fibres (POFs).

Knit prototypes were constructed using a 7-gauge industrial hand flat knitting machine. The textile prototype swatches developed in this study tested POF illumination in three types of knitting structures: intervallic knit and float stitch structures; POF inlaid into double plain and full cardigan structures; and double plain and partial knitting structures. The illuminative effects of the POFs in seven prototype swatches were analysed and compared.

It is possible to use an industrial hand flat knitting machine to knit POFs. Longer floats expose more POFs, which boosts illumination but limits the textile’s horizontal stretchability. The openness of the full cardigan structure maximises POF exposure and contributes to even illumination. The partial knitting in different sections achieves the most complete physical integration of POFs into the knitted textiles but constrains the horizontal stretchability of the textiles.

The integration of POFs into knitted textiles provides a functional illuminative effect. Applications include but are not limited to fashion, architecture and interior design.

This study is novel, as it investigates new POF knitted textiles with different loop structures. This study examines how knit stitches affect POFs in intervallic knit and float stitch, inlaid POF double knit, double plain and partial knit and the illuminative effects of the knitted textile.

This volume explores an expansive array of organizational imaginaries, or understandings of organizational possibilities, with a focus on how collectivist-democratic organizations offer alternatives to conventional for-profit managerial enterprises. These include worker and consumer cooperatives and other enterprises that, to varying degrees, (1) emphasize social values over profit; (2) are owned not by shareholders but by workers, consumers, or other stakeholders; (3) employ democratic forms of managing their operations; and (4) have social ties to the organization based on moral and emotional commitments. The contributors to this volume examine how these enterprises generate solidarity among members, network with other organizations and communities, contend with market pressures, and enhance their larger organizational ecosystems. In this introductory paper, the authors put forward an inclusive organizational typology whose continuums account for four key sources of variation – values, ownership, management, and social relations – and argue that enterprises fall between these two poles of the collectivist-democratic organization and the for-profit managerial enterprise. Drawing from this volume’s empirical studies, the authors situate these market actors within fields of competition and contestation shaped not just by state action and legal frameworks, but also by the presence or absence of social movements, labor unions, and meta-organizations. This typology challenges conventional conceptualizations of for-profit managerial enterprises as ideals or norms, reconnects past models of organizing among marginalized communities with contemporary and future possibilities, and offers activists and entrepreneurs a sense of the wide range of possibilities for building enterprises that differ from dominant models.

The purpose of this paper is to understand restaurant operators’ perception towards key areas of green practices that could be adopted in the future operations of the restaurant business in Malaysia.

The paper used a qualitative approach through face-to-face interviews. Five restaurant operators who operated their independently owned casual upscale restaurants in the Klang Valley were selected as the respondents for the interviews.

Eight areas of green practices adapted from Hu et al. (2010) have been commented and proposed to be served as a guideline to design the Environmental Management System (EMS) for restaurants to go green in Malaysia. Although the feedback given on the feasibility of implementing these green practices provided by the restaurant operators were generally positive, challenges lies ahead in getting them to adopt these green practices. It required understanding of the difficulties and motivations of implementing these practices.

An in-depth understanding from the voices of restaurant operators was essential for further policy formulation and implementation in fostering the green practices which in turn can serve as a “win-win” situation for all parties.

There seems to be a dearth of studies conducted on the perceptions of restaurant operators about the feasibility of green practices adoption in the operation of the restaurants in Malaysia. The implementation of EMS or the adoption of green practices was a vital missing-link among the restaurants. The outcome of this paper was expected to provide new ideas and knowledge on the areas of green practices to be adopted as the environmental guidelines to operate restaurants in Malaysia.

This paper aims to investigate the influence of five environment-related factors on green restaurant patronage intention (IN) among restaurant patrons in Malaysiaxd.

The unit of analysis was individual restaurant patrons who dined at casual dining restaurants when the survey was conducted. Among the 600 questionnaires distributed, a total of 500 were deemed usable and sufficient for data analysis. Descriptive, reliability, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to analyze the data.

Respondents were concerned about the welfare and interests of others and demonstrated a positive attitude toward the environment and green purchasing. However, these three factors do not influence IN. Conversely, specific attitudes toward green restaurant practices and green purchase behavior determine such intention. This shows that a specific attitude measure serves as a better and closer predictor to predict a specific behavioral intention in a green restaurant setting, as compared to the general attitude measures. The results also indicated that green buyers who were engaged in purchasing green products will continue to dine at green restaurants in the future.

The finding provides an insight to the restaurant operators to access the feasibility of entering in the green market.

Although the predictive power of physiological factors such as environmental values, attitudes and behavior on the pro-environment-related behavior has been researched extensively in the past, very limited studies had investigated those factors simultaneously in the context of IN.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, China’s outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) is growing steadily and Chinese multinationals (MNCs) are playing an increasingly important role in the global economy. Thus, the number of papers focusing on China’s OFDI and Chinese MNCs has been increasing during the last years. The aim of this chapter is to carry out a review of the empirical papers dealing with Chinese MNCs published between 2002 and 2012 in high-impact international business and management journals.

This chapter reviews 43 empirical papers focusing on Chinese MNCs that were published in nine major scholarly journals between 2002 and 2012.

We report individual and institutional contributions, the theories and methods used, the research topics, and the main findings. We also discuss implications for future research.

Some previous literature reviews have dealt with research on China’s OFDI and Chinese MNCs. Nevertheless, none of the earlier reviews dealt specifically with empirical papers; neither did they provide an analysis of both individual and institutional contributions.

Halal cosmetic products are considered as innovation and revolution in the cosmetic industry as they offer high-quality products that follow the halal compliance and meet the strict scientific guidelines. However, halal cosmetic brands are still facing challenges in their positioning and are unable to identify how to encourage customers to buy. Although there is an increasing awareness towards the use of halal cosmetics among the Generation Y consumers, the factors that might stimulus their purchase intention of halal cosmetics is still ambiguous. Besides, there is a lack of well-established study on the role of religious belief as a predictor to Generation Y consumers’ purchase intention. To address the gap, this study aims to propose a model to reveal the distinctive factors that influence the purchase intention of halal cosmetics among Generation Y in Malaysia.

The population for this study consisted of Generation Y consumers. A closed-ended questionnaire was used for data collection from a sample of 262 respondents. The proposed model was tested using partial least squares structural equation modelling.

This study discovered that ingredient safety followed by the halal logo is very important predictor for the purchase intention of halal cosmetic products among Generation Y consumers. Unexpectedly, this study finds that religious belief plays the least important role in purchase intention.

This study fills the gap in the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) by improving its limitation through considering the unbiased determinant of behaviour i.e. religious belief.

This study recommends cosmetics companies to position their products based on the importance of safety ingredient with halal logo as unique attributes of the product. It also suggests marketers to understand the right promotion strategy to be used in targeting the right market segment.

TPB is only based on cognitive processing and it ignores one’s needs/motivations prior to engaging in certain behaviour. Hence, this study looks into religious belief as a means of motivation and one of the important determinants of TPB.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a web-based system that provides an efficient means for managing suppliers’ performance which also facilitates the leveraging of suppliers’ knowledge for the benefit of the on-going projects.

Case study approach is adopted. In total, 12 semi-structured interviews are conducted with Malaysia-based public listed construction companies to study their current practice and the requirements for the development of an information and communication technology (ICT) aided system for the purpose. Subsequently, a web-based system for managing suppliers’ performance is developed using ASP.net and MSSQL database.

Most of the case study companies are found to have low levels of ICT adoption and still resort to handling the majority of the tasks involved in the selection and management of suppliers’ performance manually. An ICT-based system that can improve the recording of important information about the suppliers, provide a function for supplier selection and facilitate the capture of useful reusable knowledge of the suppliers is needed.

The paper has shown empirically that a web-based suppliers’ performance management system eases the supplier selection process and the monitoring of suppliers’ performance. In addition, it demonstrates how such systems can be designed to capture and facilitate the leveraging of suppliers’ knowledge, and how suppliers’ knowledge contribution can be recognised as part of their performance. The system adopts a novel two-way communication model which provides the suppliers the access to their own performance records to identify room for improvements.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the antecedents of successful organizational cross-border knowledge transfer and also the relationship among the antecedents for sustainable competitive advantage.

First, a focus group study was conducted to identify major constructs and map out the proposed framework. This is then followed by questionnaire survey from 210 Malaysian multimedia super corridor (MSC) status corporations as recipients. Their international business affiliates refer to any organizations located outside Malaysia with which the recipient firm has a relationship. Data were analysed using SPSS.

The findings suggest that the perceived value of the knowledge, relational dimension and cognitive dimension, as well as recipient learning intent and the attractiveness of a foreign source are significant related to the effectiveness of organizational cross-border knowledge transfer.

Because this research only covered 210 MSC status corporations, future research can try to have more coverage on other industry to have larger sample size for generalizability purposes. Other factors such as organizational and context characteristics can be added as antecedents to strengthen the framework for effective knowledge transfer.

The empirical findings can be used as a guideline for MSC status firms to undergo a self-check and help them rethink and reposition themselves in light of the findings. It helps MSC status corporations to frame their organizational cross-border knowledge transfer activities to enable the creation and application of knowledge which should allow them to drive the capability of creating and retaining a greater value onto their core business competencies.

This study provides valuable insights to help creating a successful foundation for organizational cross-border knowledge transfer. This study is also among few studies to examine the critical antecedents in successful organizational cross-border knowledge transfer from a multidimensional perspective in Malaysia.

The purpose of this study is to propose a research framework to examine the effects of consumer consciousness, food safety concern and healthy lifestyle on the attitudes toward eating “green” simultaneously in a single study. Besides, the mediating role of healthy lifestyle in forming a positive attitude toward eating “green” is also examined in this study.

A questionnaire-based approach was applied in this study. The unit of analysis was individual consumer (aged 18 years and above) who lived in Klang Valley, Malaysia. PLS-SEM was used to test the structural relationship of the constructs in the model based on the 300 useable data collected.

The results indicated that health consciousness, food safety concern and healthy lifestyle have a significant effect on attitudes toward eating “green”, whereas environmental and price consciousness did not have such effect. A healthy lifestyle also mediates the relationship between health consciousness and attitude toward eating “green”. An individual’s healthy lifestyle that focused on physical health-related activities will increase the effect of consumer health consciousness on their attitudes toward eating “green”.

The outcome of this study provided deeper insights for firms to assess the feasibility of entering or expanding their operations in the green market with more enduring and effective sales and marketing strategies.

Consumers’ acceptance of or resistance toward organic food had become the centre of the research focus by the academician and the industrial practitioners over the years, despite the inconsistencies of the results obtained to predict such behavior. In this study, besides examining the direct effect of the proposed variables on the attitudes toward eating “green”, the mediating role of a healthy lifestyle in forming such attitudes was also examined.

This paper aims to identify the key competencies managerial coaches have and examine the significant competencies that affect coaching effectiveness in the Malaysian telecommunications industry.

The unit of analysis was individual managerial coaches who were working in the Malaysian telecommunications industry. Among the 300 questionnaires distributed, a total of 140 were obtained and deemed sufficiently complete to be useable. Descriptive and multiple regression analyses were used to analyze the data.

The results indicated that leadership development is the most important function of managerial coaching, followed by communication. In addition, co-creating the relationship and effective communication are the critical categories of competencies for managerial coaching. Analysis from the regression highlighted that effective communication is the influencing factor on the coaching effectiveness, followed by facilitating learning, and results. The findings also shown that all the core competencies in setting foundation are the significant influencing factors.

Analyses relied on cross-sectional data and limits the generalizability of findings to other industries. The utilization of self-reported perceptual data may suffer from response bias.

This paper highlights personal or professional coaching characteristics that might affect managerial leadership development. It also provides a list of important criteria for developing effective managerial coaching to assist Malaysian managerial coaches to build a world class workforce.

Using International Coach Foundation competency model, this study provides an insight on the important criteria to develop and select coaching managers effectively which ultimately lead to performance improvement in the organization.