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Market orientation is often mentioned as a key factor for the success of domestic and international activities, but our knowledge about differences in degrees of market orientation remains limited for firms that have varying degrees of international activities. In particular, the literature is very sparse with regard to studies of newly established firms. Our study empirically explores this gap examining how different types of new ventures adopt two strategic components of market orientation – customer orientation and competitor orientation. Our empirical evidence is based on responses from CEOs of 249 Danish manufacturing firms that are categorized into four groups, depending on their degree of international operations within the first three years. We demonstrate that the most internationally oriented firms seem to be the most market oriented in general. They are significantly more competitor-oriented than domestically oriented firms, but the results regarding customer orientation are more mixed. Interestingly, we find indications that the strategic emphasis on customer orientation may be higher for firms with domestic operations than for those with limited international operations. We discuss implications for research and managers.

This chapter attempts to explore customer loyalty and retention in the context of Pakistani restaurants. Effects of customer perceived value and service quality as antecedents are tested on customer loyalty and retention along with the mediating effects of customer satisfaction and customer relationship management quality. This chapter is conducted in 15 restaurants from Multan. Results reveal how the restaurant sector lacks a monitoring mechanism that promotes an effective customer relationship. For example, what kinds of measurements the manager could use to enhance a customer's loyalty and retention.

This chapter explores the protest self-immolations since 2009 of over 100 Tibetans in China. It investigates whether these events have ecological as well as social causes and may thus be relevant to the emerging discipline of ‘EcoHealth’.

Targeted literature review and reflective analysis, presented as a narrative.

Chinese citizens identifying as Tibetan have experienced substantial ethnically based discrimination for over 60 years, manifest as attempted cultural destruction, pervasive disrespect and linguistic suppression. Tibetans, now a minority in much of their former territory, have witnessed and at times been forced to participate in ecological destruction, much of it led by Chinese settlers, endorsed by occupying authorities. Tibetans have for decades protested against the Chinese they regard as invaders and occupiers, but Tibetan acts of protest self-immolation are a recent response. Academic analysis has been scarce, particularly by Chinese scholars. Until now, EcoHealth practitioners have also denied any relevance, as if in a waltz led by the Chinese government.

Attempts to identify rational causes for Tibetan self-immolation conflict with themes of liberation and fairness central to Communist Chinese ideology. Most Chinese analysis of Tibetan self-immolation is superficial, nationalistic and unsympathetic. Also disturbing is the reaction to these issues shown by the International Association of Ecology and Health. It is suggested that this illustrates a failure to translate rhetoric of ‘speaking truth to power’ to reality, a retreat from idealism common to many social movements.

Increasing human demand on a limited biosphere necessitates a deepened understanding of eco-social factors. Practitioners concerned with sustaining our civilisation are encouraged to explore the integrated dimensions revealed by this case study.

Data visualizations in some form or another have served as decision-support tools for many centuries. In conjunction with advancements in information technology, data visualizations have become more accessible and more efficient to generate. In fact, virtually all enterprise resource planning and human resource (HR) information system vendors offer off-the-shelf data visualizations as part of decision-support dashboards as well as stand-alone images and displays for reporting. Plus, advances in programing languages and software such as Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, R, and Python have expanded the possibilities of fully customized graphics. Despite the proliferation of data visualization, relatively little is known about how to design data visualizations for displaying different types of HR data to different user groups, for different purposes, and with the overarching goal of improving the ways in which users comprehend and interpret data visualizations for decision-making purposes. To understand the state of science and practice as they relate to HR data visualizations and data visualizations in general, we review the literature on data visualizations across disciplines and offer an organizing framework that emphasizes the roles data visualization characteristics (e.g., display type, features), user characteristics (e.g., experience, individual differences), tasks, and objectives (e.g., compare values) play in user comprehension, interpretation, and decision-making. Finally, we close by proposing future directions for science and practice.

Most poverty research has explored monetary poverty. This chapter presents and analyzes the global multidimensional poverty index (MPI) estimations for China. Using China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), we find China’s global MPI was 0.035 in 2010 and decreased significantly to 0.017 in 2014. The dimensional composition of MPI suggests that nutrition, education, safe drinking water, and cooking fuel contribute most to overall non-monetary poverty in China. Such analysis is also applied to subgroups, including geographic areas (rural/urban, east/central/west, provinces), as well as social characteristics such as gender of the household heads, age, education level, marital status, household size, migration status, ethnicity, and religion. We find the level and composition of poverty differs significantly across certain subgroups. We also find high levels of mismatch between monetary and multidimensional poverty at the household level, which highlights the importance of using both complementary measures to track progress in eradicating poverty.

Dynamic predictions of financial distress of the firms have received less attention in finance literature rather than static prediction, specifically in Malaysia. This study, therefore, investigates dynamic symptoms of the financial distress event a few years before it happened to the firms by using neural network method. Cox Proportional Hazard regression models are used to estimate the survival probabilities of Malaysian PN17 and GN3 listed firms. Forecast accuracy is evaluated using receiver operating characteristics curve. From the findings, it shown that the independent directors’ ownership has negative association with the financial distress likelihood. In addition, this study modeled a mix of corporate financial distress predictors for Malaysian firms. The combination of financial and non-financial ratios which pressure-sensitive institutional ownership, independent director ownership, and Earnings Before Interest and Taxes to Total Asset shown a negative relationship with financial distress likelihood specifically one year before the firms being listed in PN 17 and GN 3 status. However, Retained Earnings to Total Asset, Interest Coverage, and Market Value of Debt have positive relationship with firm financial distress likelihood. These research findings also contribute to the policy implications to the Securities Commission and specifically to Bursa Malaysia. Furthermore, one of the initial goals in introducing the PN17 and GN3 status is to alleviate the information asymmetry between distressed firms, the regulators, and investors. Therefore, the regulator would be able to monitor effectively distressed firms, and investors can protect from imprudent investment.

The arguments in this chapter address all three of the questions motivating this volume on network strategy. First, they focus on the issue of network evolution and show how networks can emerge and change over time. Second, the chapter tackles the issue of endogeneity and shows that, under certain conditions, some structural advantages do precede rather than follow network positions. Networks evolve over trajectories and the trajectories matter. Third, the arguments respond to the core question of network entrepreneurship: does the awareness of structural advantages available to network positions inspire managers, acting on behalf of organizations, to seek these advantages? In responding, this chapter challenges the idea that filling structural holes necessarily confers advantages on the actors filling them. It follows that the advantages of bridging are dependent not only on the network structure, when decisions regarding tie formation or deletion are made, but also on the costs of forming and maintaining ties relative to the benefits obtained from doing so.

Nearest neighbor imputation has a long tradition for handling item nonresponse in survey sampling. In this article, we study the asymptotic properties of the nearest neighbor imputation estimator for general population parameters, including population means, proportions and quantiles. For variance estimation, we propose novel replication variance estimation, which is asymptotically valid and straightforward to implement. The main idea is to construct replicates of the estimator directly based on its asymptotically linear terms, instead of individual records of variables. The simulation results show that nearest neighbor imputation and the proposed variance estimation provide valid inferences for general population parameters.

With the continuous development of intelligent technologies, knowledge graph, the backbone of artificial intelligence, has attracted much attention from both academic and industrial communities due to its powerful capability of knowledge representation and reasoning. Besides, knowledge graph has been widely applied in different kinds of applications, such as semantic search, question answering, knowledge management, and so on. In recent years, knowledge graph techniques in China are also developing rapidly and different Chinese knowledge graphs have been built to support various applications. Under the background of “One Belt One Road (OBOR)” initiative, cooperating with the countries along OBOR on studying knowledge graph techniques and applications will greatly promote the development of artificial intelligence. At the same time, the accumulated experience of China on developing knowledge graph is also a good reference. Thus, in this chapter, the authors mainly introduce the development of Chinese knowledge graphs and their applications. The authors first describe the background of OBOR, and then introduce the concept of knowledge graph and three typical Chinese knowledge graphs, including Zhishi.me, CN-DBpedia, and XLORE. Finally, the authors demonstrate several applications of Chinese knowledge graphs.

This chapter sheds light on how the internationalization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) is jointly influenced by the ownership involvement of the state and other relational investors and by the home country’s institutional setting. It integrates international business literature and insights from the theory of corporate governance into a varieties of capitalism framework. Taking a configurational perspective, the interdependencies that link the SOE internationalization to the joint effects of particular combinations of actors and institutions are analyzed. As a result, it is argued that only a few home country–SOE governance configurations favor the expansion of SOEs abroad: (i) a configuration in which the state is a dominant owner capable of aligning the interests of any other private shareholder and the government is embedded in a proactive institutional context, so as to effectively orchestrate the internationalization process, (ii) a configuration in which, assuming the home country institutions markedly deficient in supporting interventions, relational co-owners are involved in SOE ownership and governance and have commitment, influential power, and competencies to equip the company with an effective strategy and competitive advantages to be exploited abroad. In all other configurations, the international performance of SOEs is worse, being undermined by institutional contexts that favor an inward-looking approach of the state and government, and/or by principal–principal agency problems.