Search results

The purpose of this paper is to treat WeChat moments as social media environments and applies the research model to explore the effect of social media environments on perceived interactivity from the perspective of environmental psychology.

This paper proposes social media environments as effective stimuli for future participate in online social interactions. First, two cues of social media environments (user-to-system cues and user-to-user cues) can be important antecedents of users’ perception of interactivity. Second, users’ intention of future participates in online social interactions can be influenced by three dimensions of perceived interactivity (action control, connectedness and responsiveness). Using data from 334 users of WeChat moments, the authors conduct partial least squares analysis to validate the research model.

The results indicate that both technological and social environments positively affect three dimensions of perceived interactivity, respectively, including action control, connectedness and responsiveness. Moreover, actual findings also suggest that higher perceived interactivity increases users’ intention of future participate in online social interactions.

This work contributes to in-depth research on the relationships between social environments and perceived interactivity. Besides, this paper demonstrates that both technological and social cues of social media environments are significant elements in simulating users’ internal experience and behavioral intention. The main conclusions of this study can be valuable to social media developers and managers.

Swift guanxi and trust can influence consumers’ decision making in social commerce. What factors will influence the formation of swift guanxi and trust between buyers and sellers in social commerce has not been clearly investigated. The purpose of this paper is to identify antecedents and impacts of swift guanxi and trust in social commerce.

An online questionnaire was used to collect the data, and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling was employed for data analysis. Social support and presence are introduced as the antecedents for swift guanxi and trust, leading to the repurchase intention (RI) and social sharing intention of customers.

The results indicate that social support and presence can influence swift guanxi and trust. Social support and presence are positively associated with swift guanxi and trust which further lead to RI and social sharing intention.

The findings can be used to guide sellers in social commerce platforms to improve their services and make good use of platform features to improve customers’ perception of presence. To attract new customers and retain old customers, sellers should also build swift guanxi and trust through the recommendation and experience sharing of previous buyers on social media.

This study combines social support theory and presence theory to investigate the factors that influence customers’ purchase decision and social sharing intention in the context of social commerce in China. The integration of social support theory and presence theory explains both the social and technical factors that influence swift guanxi and trust in social commerce.

This paper provides a researcher's account of fieldwork experience in conducting audit research in China. By illustrating on-site fieldwork encounters, the paper reflects stages of access negotiation and management in the fieldwork, reveals the researcher's embodied “affects” in the fieldwork and reasserts the value of researcher's openness and attention in the fieldwork.

This paper uses autoethnography as its overall epistemology. Fieldwork diaries and vignettes are written in the first-person voice to present the researcher's embodied account of fieldwork experience, researcher’s learning and coping skills in managing the fieldwork.

The research findings are not detached from the researcher's experience of the fieldwork. The fieldwork experiences in this study highlight that the fieldwork access is an ongoing process. Different stages of access negotiations, from rejection to acceptance, reveal the tensions between researcher and participants. This study draws attention to the online platform, WeChat, in connecting with auditors to learn from them and suggests openness to the fieldwork encounters and a resilient engagement with auditors.

In reflecting on the researcher's transformation during the fieldwork, this paper argues for a relational and engaged way of conducting fieldwork, rather than a disengaged and judgemental approach in studying auditors' working lives. The paper pays attention to fieldwork as a process and how the knowledge learned in the field is infused with researcher's fieldwork experiences.

This study aims to examine the demographic differences of Chinese nationals’ travel experience sharing through different offline and online platforms.

Cross-tabulation analysis was applied on a national sample of 6081 respondents in China.

The study found that Chinese women tend to share travel experience more often than Chinese men; old people in China tend to use the face-to-face approach more than online or social media to share their travel experience. About 66.5 per cent of the survey sample used WeChat Moments to share their travel experience, highlighting WeChat as the dominating social media platform in China for travel sharing. In general, people who share via online platforms (WeChat, Weibo, QQ Space) tend to be young, single or unmarried, well-educated and earning a high monthly income.

The study offers an in-depth understanding of travel experience sharing idiosyncrasies in China.

The rise of social media has gained increasing attention in recent years; however, few studies have focused on social media users’ specific behavior and subjective well-being. To fill this research gap, the purpose of this paper is to develop an integrated model to investigate factors that affect social media user’s share intention and the relationship between user’s share intention and subjective well-being.

Structural equation model is used in this study. A field survey with 398 WeChat users is conducted to test the research model and hypotheses.

The empirical results show that: utilitarian value, hedonic value, user satisfaction and information source credibility are important factors affecting users’ share intention; users’ share intention positively affects user’s subjective well-being; moderating effects show that relative significance positively moderates the relationship between utilitarian value and users’ share intention; and users’ demographic characteristics differences actually exist in users’ share intention.

First, the authors clear that factors affect social media users’ share intention from the perspective of customer-perceived value. The results deepen our understanding about the factors that affect WeChat users’ share intention. Second, the authors focus on the effect of users’ specific behavior on users’ subjective well-being and found that users’ share intention is one of the important aspects that affect user’s subjective well-being. More importantly, the authors tested users’ characteristic differences in social media users’ share intention, which have previously received limited attention.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate university students’ WeChat usage during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in relation to the mediating role of online self-disclosure on their quality of friendship and well-being. A model is proposed to explain how students’ interactions occur during the lockdown and the mediatory role which self-disclosure plays in influencing their socio-psychological markup.

The research model was tested empirically through a survey conducted online with 600 research participants, comprising of university students in China.

Results in structural equation modeling show that WeChat interaction significantly correlates with the quality of friendship, online self-disclosure but not significantly correlates with well-being, but an indirect relationship was found out in the mediation analysis. There is also a significant relationship between online self-disclosure, quality of friendship and well-being. Mediation analysis shows that online self-disclosure mediates the relationship between interactions on WeChat and quality of friendship; it also mediates the relationship between WeChat interaction and well-being. In all, the results achieved in this study will significantly help provide more insights in comprehending the nuances attached to some socio-psychological aspects of WeChat and how its usage affects people during the period of crisis.

Theoretically based investigation of WeChat usage among university students and its relationship with online self-disclosure, quality of friendship and well-being is still quite scarce, thereby underscoring the needs and significance of a theoretically based study in this regard. This study tested the credibility and validity of the proposed model in the context of the recent COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in China, which is one of the first in recent times.

Drawing on the social presence theory, this study aims to explore how supplier–customer social media interactions influence supplier observers’ trust in the customers and what mechanisms contribute to variation in trust experience.

A total of 36 semi-structured interviews were conducted with Chinese suppliers using WeChat for business-to-business interactions. Data were analyzed in three steps: open coding, axial coding and selective coding.

Findings reveal that varied trust is based not only on the categories of social presence of interaction – whether social presence is embedded in informative interactions – but also on the perceived selectivity in social presence. Observer suppliers who experience selectivity during social and affective interactions create a perception of hidden information and an unhealthy relationship atmosphere, and report a sense of emotional vulnerability, thus eroding cognitive and affective trust.

The findings contribute new understandings to social presence theory by exploring the social presence of interactions in a supplier–supplier–customer triad and offer valuable insights into business-to-business social media literature by adopting a suppliers’ viewpoint to unpack the mechanisms of how social presence of interaction positively and negatively influences suppliers’ trust and behavioral responses.

This study focuses on the self-organized cooperative consumption of platform participants on social media platform, and reveals how the brand owner cooperates with two-sided customers to achieve value co-creation.

The authors adopted a case study approach to explore how a Chinese beauty startup developed collaborative networks from 2013 to 2022, and tracked the the changes of network structure and cooperation mechanism.

The study finds that the brand owner cooperates with two-sided customers to integrate resources and establish diverse relational trust, which enhances the evolution of a heterogeneous collaborative network for value co-creation.

The study builds upon traditional dyadic actor-to-actor interactions between providers and customers, develops a novel interaction framework of actor-to-network to explain the value co-creation by collaborative networking, reveals the self-organized mechanism of cooperative consumption on social media.