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The goal of this chapter is to respond to the theoretical inquiries by scholars who are interested in how the public–private partnership (PPP) models adapt to China’s context where political power dictates economic strategies. We also want to provide suggestions to policy designers who aim to promote a sustainable investment environment for domestic and international investors. We review the literature that explains the upside and downside of PPP projects in contemporary China. (1) We classify the trajectory of PPP evolution into four phases, i.e., emergence, growth, recession and revival. (2) We note that private companies take a disadvantageous position in the partnership compared with governments and state-owned enterprises because of a lack of specialized legislation, unequal competition between private companies and state-owned enterprises and the opposition from the civic society. (3) We identify political risks as the most influential risks. Political risks also lead to the misallocation of other risks between public and private parties that contributes to the high failure rate of China’s PPP projects. Based on these findings, we recommend governments to draft specialized legislation, stabilize the political environment and provide favourable subsidies to local governments to limit the risks involved in PPP projects. We also advise private enterprises and state-owned enterprises to focus on negotiating over task and risk division with governments when they make decisions to participate in PPP projects. This full review of studies on PPP development in China provides reliable recommendations to scholars, governments and enterprises.

Today’s business environment has the nature that challenges the decision-making processes of businesses with its many different factors including technological developments and changing consumer structures. Previous research focused on specific contexts of the business environment regarding marketing and innovation issues, however, an integrative approach can be helpful for understanding and taking actions. This study aims to present a comprehensive framework which employs sensemaking from management literature as an approach to evaluate the market environment. Following a conceptual approach for the methodology, a framework consisting of three stages: discovery, sensemaking, and prediction is included in the study. Proposed framework identifies the stages for the sensemaking of consumers and can guide marketing decision-makers for competitiveness in the digital world.

There is significant amount of literature tackling different issues related to the port industry. The present chapter focuses on a single business unit of seaports aiming at the documentation of works related to container terminals.

An effort to review, collect and present the majority of the works present in the last 30 years, between 1980 and 2010, has been made in order to picture the problems dealt and methods used by the authors in the specific research field. To facilitate the reader, studies have been grouped under five categories of addressed problems (productivity and competitiveness, yard and equipment utilization, equipment scheduling, berth planning, loading/unloading) and four modelling methodologies (mathematics and operations research, management and economics, simulation, stochastic modelling).

The analysis shows that most works focus on productivity and competitiveness issues followed by yard and equipment utilisation and equipment scheduling. In reference to the methodologies used managerial and economic approaches lead, followed by mathematics and operations research.

In reference to future research, two fields have been identified where there is scope of significant contribution by the academic community: container terminal security and container terminal supply chain integration.

The present chapter provides the framework for researchers in the field of port container terminals to picture the so far works in this research area and enables the identification of gaps at both research question and methodology level for further research.

There has been a resurgence of interest in comparative and international research on teacher education that has been driven, in large part, by the emergence over the past two decades of comprehensive international studies of student achievement supported by (1) the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and (2) the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). Widely published country rankings that set benchmarks for student achievement suggest the importance of understanding more fully what specific characteristics set highly ranked countries apart, especially quality of teaching and teacher education.

Recent literature on comparative and international teacher education is reviewed, focusing on special issues of Prospects (Vol. 42, March 2012, “Internationalization of Teacher Education”), sponsored by the UNESCO International Bureau of Education (IBE) in Geneva, Switzerland, and the International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education (Vol. 11, August 2013, “International Perspectives on Mathematics and Science Teacher Education for the Future”), sponsored by the National Science Council of Taiwan.

A conceptual framework for describing the complexity of teacher education in comparative and international context is presented, adapting an approach used for understanding educational change and reform in emerging democracies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of theoretical perspectives that have been applied to teacher education in comparative and international education with recommendations for new directions that might inform scholarly understanding as well as practice.

Despite the increase in empirical studies of social enterprise in management and organization research, the lack of a cohesive knowledge base in this area is concerning. In this chapter, we propose that the underdevelopment of the attendant research infrastructure is an important, but oft-overlooked, barrier to the development of this body of empirical research.

We explore this proposition through a review of 55 empirical studies of social enterprises published in the last fifteen years, in which we examine the mix and trajectory of research methods used and the research infrastructure on which these studies depend.

We find that empirical research has used social enterprise largely as a context for theory development, rather than deductively testing, and thus building upon, existing theories. The latter pattern is due largely to the absence of two key dimensions of infrastructure: well-defined samples, and consistent, operational measures of social enterprise success. Finally, we identify present trends along both dimensions that contribute to changing the research infrastructure for empirical social enterprise research.

Our analysis highlights the critical need for research infrastructure to advance empirical research on social enterprise. From this perspective, research infrastructure-building provides an important opportunity for researchers interested in social enterprise and others interested in enabling high-quality empirical research in this setting.

This study conducts a logistic regression analysis of the ability of excess cash and short-term bank loans to substitute for each other and a multiple regression analysis of the factors influencing excess cash and short-term bank loans holdings. In addition, a questionnaire is used to survey the views of Taiwan’s corporate financial leaders on the factors influencing these two liquidity resources. The empirical results support a certain level of substitution between the two types of holdings. The regression analysis shows that for companies that would accumulate more excess cash when interest rates are low, have strong corporate performance, have low debt ratios, and whose chairman of the board and chief executive officer (CEO) are not the same person. Companies tend to have more short-term bank loans when corporate performance is poor, debt ratios are high, and the chairman of the board and CEO are the same person, as well as when the degree of the deviation of control is small. We find that factors on financial structure, operating performance, cost of capital and corporate governance have significant influence on the holdings of these two liquidity facilities in regression, whereas the influence factors exclude corporate governance in questionnaire.

Recent academic studies, as well as media reporting, have devoted substantial attention to the ongoing “crisis of democracy.” Democratic “backsliding” of Central and Eastern Europe – sometimes referred to as an effort to establish a new system of “illiberal democracy” – is one of the most visible symptoms of this crisis. This narrative is supported by the quantitative metrics of democratic quality, reflecting professional community views on the appropriate criteria to define and assess democracy. However, once general public views expressed in the survey item of “satisfaction with democracy” are taken into account, the picture changes markedly. This chapter analyzes quantitative metrics reflecting expert community consensus and the general public assessment of the quality of democracy in the 27 EU members over the period 2010–2019. It documents substantial divergence between the perspectives of the experts and the general public – while expert-based indexes portray Central and Eastern European backsliding as the most significant trend in the EU democratic landscape, public opinion identifies a very different set of democracy's successes and failures. As experts and the general public fail to arrive at mutually accepted criteria of democratic performance evaluation, public debate has become futile. Meaningful discussion and systemic corrections have become unlikely, creating conditions easily exploitable by the populists, eager to frame it as an example of “elite” detachment from the “ordinary people”.