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Purpose: The purpose of this chapter is to elaborate on the major conceptual and practical considerations of the use of robots, artificial intelligence and service automation (RAISA) in travel, tourism, and hospitality companies (TTH).

Design/methodology/approach: The chapter develops a conceptual framework of the major issues related to the use of RAISA in the travel, tourism and hospitality context.

Findings: The findings indicate that while there is a creeping incursion of RAISA into TTH, there are major concerns that the TTH industry has to consider in regard to automating TTH services.

Practical implications: In a practical sense, the chapter identifies the decisions that TTH industry professionals need to take when dealing with RAISA technologies. Furthermore, the chapter elaborates on the impacts RAISA have on business operations, marketing management, human resources and financial management of TTH companies. The TTH industry has to adjust its practices and communicate with its workforce in ways as not to increase Luddite tendencies and resistance among employees.

Social implications: The analysis shows that there is an upcoming era in which automation of services will be so advanced that wealthy countries may not need to import labour to make up with its own aging workforce, suggesting that RAISA and its further development has the potential for disrupting society and international relations.

Originality/value: This chapter provides a comprehensive review of the issues related to the use of RAISA in the TTH industry, including the drivers of RAISA adoption in tourism, advantages and disadvantages of RAISA technologies compared to human employees, decisions that managers need to take, and the impacts of RAISA on business processes. It shows how macroenvironmental pressures shape the microeconomic decisions to use RAISA in a TTH context.

This paper examines the impact of residents’ human capital investment inequality on the urban–rural income gap, using China’s provincial panel data from 1997 to 2013. The results show that, at the national level as well as at the regional level, residents’ overall human capital investment inequality has a positive significant impact on the urban–rural income gap. In addition, the impact of overall human capital investment inequality increased monotonically from the eastern region inward to the western region. In terms of the relative impact of each component of human capital investment inequality on the urban–rural income gap, migration investment inequality appears to have the greatest impact at the national level, whereas health investment inequality has the greatest impact on the urban–rural income gap in the eastern region, and education investment inequality exhibits the greatest impact in the central and western regions. We also investigate the impact of human capital investment inequality on the urban–rural income gap over different periods. The results show that residents’ overall human capital investment inequality had a positive impact on the urban–rural income gap in the period 1997–2008, but the impact rapidly shrunk in 2009–2013. Furthermore, the impact of residents’ health investment inequality on the urban–rural income gap shows a downward trend, and the impact of residents’ education investment inequality trended slightly upward from 1997 to 2008, and then rapidly shrunk in 2009–2013. Finally, the impact of residents’ migration investment inequality was only significant in 1997–2002.

In any time and space and under any circumstance, we find peasants are never passive actors in their livelihoods and rural development. Instead, they always create space for manoeuvre in order to make changes. This chapter analyses the innovative actions taken by the majority of rural inhabitants in rural areas during the overwhelming modernization process, so as to affirm that peasants are the main actors of rural development. It is they who have shaped the transformation of rural societies and the history. Through the analysis, this chapter concludes that rural development is not an objective, a blueprint nor a design. It is not the to-be-developed rear field in modernization. It is not the babysitter for cities, nor a rehearsal place for bureaucrats to testify their random thoughts. Rural development is what peasants do. The path they have chosen reveals scenery so different from modernization. If we regard development as a social change, or a cross with influential meanings, we could understand rural development as peasants’ victories over their predicament. Villages accommodate not only peasants, but without peasants villages would surely vanish. In this sense, the most important part in rural development or rural change is peasants – their conditions and their feelings.

The sources and platforms utilized for environmental communication have been significantly expanded by the emergence of social media. The validity, form, and content of environmental communication processes are particularly radical departures from conventional media, making personal green blogs important of study as areas of everyday culture politics where people make understanding of environmental challenges. There is currently a lack of research on how social media might encourage green behaviours. This research reveals the impact of social media use and green blogging on green purchasing behaviour, which is supported by the social learning theory. Present study shows that social media use and green blogging have a substantial positive connection, drawing on a sample of 580 respondents from Pakistan examined using structural equation modelling. Both notions have a considerable impact on consumers' intentions to make green purchases, and social media trust plays a moderating role in this relationship. Furthermore, social media trust considerably modifies the connections between green blogging and social media use that is related to green behaviour. The current study is novel and offers important information to understand how social media might promote eco-friendly habits and behaviour.

The Burmese military has been successful in maintaining its authoritarian rule in the past decades. In 2011, however, the junta shifted its power to civilian government despite the absence of severe political pressure from inside or outside. Since then, the new government has introduced many reforms that allow greater political liberty in Burma. This chapter locates the junta’s power shift as part of a wider process of the military consolidating political legitimacy. It argues that as the junta’s power consolidation reached its bottleneck in the 2000s, political reform was imperative as the pre-condition for international legitimacy and economic development. Yet, regarding aspects of the content of the new constitution, military-civilian power relationships, and ethnic minority-central government relations, it remains to be seen whether Burma will move toward actual democratization. For President Thein Sein, one of the big challenges will be satisfying the high expectations of the international community and domestic opposition parties while still being able to control the pace of reform and maintain power.

This chapter provides a thorough historical overview of policies that have governed and guided scientific research in China since 1949 and illustrates changes in scientific publications that accompanied these policy reforms and programs.

We divide this historical period into four stages, each with distinct R&D policies: (1) 1949–1955, a period of socialist transformation; (2) 1956–1965, a period of struggle for higher education and research development in a rapidly changing political environment; (3) 1966–1976, the lost decade of the Cultural Revolution; and (4) 1976–present, a period when major national policies have significantly promoted scientific research in China. We use the SPHERE project’s comprehensive historical dataset based on Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science and data from a set of research universities in China to analyze changes in scientific publication rates concurrent with these policy reforms and programs.

The analysis suggests a tight connection between national policy and scientific research productivity in higher education. The central government controlled scientific research through direct administration in early periods and has guided research activities through funding specific programs in recent decades. Due to their resource dependency on the central government, higher education institutions have been quite responsive to the common goals set by the central government. As a result, what is measured tends to be accomplished.

The chapter provides an in-depth description about the rise of higher education and science in China and produces recommendations for future development.

This paper builds homogenous series of the rate of surplus value (RSV) for the Chinese economy over the extended period 1956–2014 with a Marxian approach. It finds that the high profitability that stimulated capital accumulation in the decade before the 2008 crisis had relied on the continuous growth in the RSV. Given that the global crisis and changes in the domestic economy undermine all the conditions maintaining the accumulation model (an expanding external market, a relatively large reserve army of labor, and a low debt-income ratio), the RSV has failed to increase and profitability declined since 2008. Thus, this paper interprets the so-called new normal of the Chinese economy as a stage of declining profitability that results mainly from the stagnant RSV and the rising value composition of capital.

The sport system is currently changing to take advantage of more entrepreneurial forms of business ventures. Sport start-ups have emerged as a new type of sport venture that can quickly enter the marketplace based on demand. The reason for this growth is due to innovation and knowledge capabilities being needed in sport organizations. This chapter examines the role of sport start-ups in the knowledge economy by focusing on the role of sport technology. This enables a better understanding about how sport entrepreneurship is leading to the formation of different types of businesses that can utilize entrepreneurial finance.

This chapter provides an overview of the findings and chapters of a thematic volume in the International Perspectives on Education and Society (IPES) series. It describes the common dataset and methods used by an international research team.

The chapter synthesizes the results of a series of country-level case studies and cross-national and regional comparisons on the growth of scientific research from 1900 until 2011. Additionally, the chapter provides a quantitative analysis of global trends in scientific, peer-reviewed publishing over the same period.

The introduction identifies common themes that emerged across the case studies examined in-depth during the multi-year research project Science Productivity, Higher Education, Research and Development and the Knowledge Society (SPHERE). First, universities have long been and are increasingly the primary organizations in science production around the globe. Second, the chapters describe in-country and cross-country patterns of competition and collaboration in scientific publications. Third, the chapters describe the national policy environments and institutionalized organizational forms that foster scientific research.

The introduction reviews selected findings and limitations of previous bibliometric studies and explains that the chapters in the volume address these limitations by applying neo-institutional theoretical frameworks to analyze bibliometric data over an extensive period.