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The purpose of this paper is to help a reader to understand how ExxonMobil has become the largest company in the world, by studying the most important event that contributed to ExxonMobil's dominance: Exxon's acquisition of Mobil.

The paper takes the form of a case study.

The authors used the ExxonMobil case to evidence factors affecting cross‐border M&A's success, from strategic, financial and operative perspectives.

This article contributes to the advancement of cross border M&A studies.

Reviews the distinctive cultural patterns found in Taiwan, and then discusses the management practices of three “excellent” Taiwanese companies and explores their success in terms of the eight major characteristics discussed by Peters and Waterman in In Search of Excellence.

This study aims to use financial stability and health facilities of countries, to cluster them for making a more consensus environment for manifesting the status of Covid-19 in a justifiable manner. The scarcity of the categorisation of the countries of the world in a common platform, and the requirement of manifesting the pandemic status such as Covid-19 in a justifiable manner create the demanding requirement. This study mainly focusses on assisting to generate a liable manifesto to criticise the span of viral infection of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 over the globe.

Data for this study has been gathered from official websites of the World Bank, and the world in data. The Louvain clustering method has been used to cluster the countries based on their financial strength and health facilities. The resulted clusters are visualised using Silhouette plots. The anomalies of the clusters had been used to quantify the pandemic situation. The status of Covid-19 has been manifested with the time series analysis through python programming.

The countries of the world have been clustered into seven, where developed countries divided into three clusters and the countries with transition economies and developing clustered together into four clusters. The time series analysis of recognised anomalies of the clusters assist to monitor the government responses and analyse the efficiency of used safety measures against the pandemic.

This study’s resulted clusters are highly valuable as a division of countries of the whole world for evaluating the health systems and for the regional levels. Further, the results of time series analysis are beneficial in monitoring the government responses and analysing the efficiency of used safety measures against the pandemic.

Purpose – This research pinpoints the limitations of conventional models for evaluating the performance of hedge funds and attempts to provide a new framework for modeling the dynamics of risk structures of hedge funds.

Methodology/approach – This chapter aims to explore how the systematic risk exposures of hedge funds vary over time and depend on exogenous variables that managers are supposed to use in their dynamic investment strategies. To achieve this, we used a Bayesian time-varying CAPM-based beta model within a state space technology.

Findings – The results showed that the volatility, term spread rate, and shocks in liquidity influence significantly on the time variation of hedge funds. Besides, the dynamics of beta indicates that the transmission channels of systematic risk are mainly the leverage levels of hedge funds and liquidity shocks.

Originality/value of chapter – These results are original because they help to explain how expected and unexpected hedge fund returns are correlated with the systematic risk factors via the beta dynamics.

Leaders are important social actors in organizations, centrally involved in establishing and maintaining institutional values, a view that was articulated by Philip Selznick (1957) nearly a half-century ago, but often overlooked in institutionalists’ accounts. Our objective is to build on Selznick’s seminal work to investigate the value proposition of leadership consistent with institutional theory. We examine public interview transcripts from 52 senior executives and discover that leaders’ conceptualizations of their entities align with the archetypes of organization (i.e., economic, hierarchical, and power oriented) and institution (i.e., ideological, creative and collectivist) and cohere around a set of relevant values. Extrapolating from this, we advance a theoretical framework of the process whereby leaders’ claims function as transformational mechanisms of value infusion in the institutionalization of organizations.

Smart card-based E-payment systems are receiving increasing attention as the number of implementations is witnessed on the rise globally. Understanding of user adoption behavior of E-payment systems that employ smart card technology becomes a research area that is of particular value and interest to both IS researchers and professionals. However, research interest focuses mostly on why a smart card-based E-payment system results in a failure or how the system could have grown into a success. This signals the fact that researchers have not had much opportunity to critically review a smart card-based E-payment system that has gained wide support and overcome the hurdle of critical mass adoption. The Octopus in Hong Kong has provided a rare opportunity for investigating smart card-based E-payment system because of its unprecedented success. This research seeks to thoroughly analyze the Octopus from technology adoption behavior perspectives.

Cultural impacts on adoption behavior are one of the key areas that this research posits to investigate. Since the present research is conducted in Hong Kong where a majority of population is Chinese ethnicity and yet is westernized in a number of aspects, assuming that users in Hong Kong are characterized by eastern or western culture is less useful. Explicit cultural characteristics at individual level are tapped into here instead of applying generalization of cultural beliefs to users to more accurately reflect cultural bias. In this vein, the technology acceptance model (TAM) is adapted, extended, and tested for its applicability cross-culturally in Hong Kong on the Octopus. Four cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede are included in this study, namely uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, individualism, and Confucian Dynamism (long-term orientation), to explore their influence on usage behavior through the mediation of perceived usefulness.

TAM is also integrated with the innovation diffusion theory (IDT) to borrow two constructs in relation to innovative characteristics, namely relative advantage and compatibility, in order to enhance the explanatory power of the proposed research model. Besides, the normative accountability of the research model is strengthened by embracing two social influences, namely subjective norm and image. As the last antecedent to perceived usefulness, prior experience serves to bring in the time variation factor to allow level of prior experience to exert both direct and moderating effects on perceived usefulness.

The resulting research model is analyzed by partial least squares (PLS)-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. The research findings reveal that all cultural dimensions demonstrate direct effect on perceived usefulness though the influence of uncertainty avoidance is found marginally significant. Other constructs on innovative characteristics and social influences are validated to be significant as hypothesized. Prior experience does indeed significantly moderate the two influences that perceived usefulness receives from relative advantage and compatibility, respectively. The research model has demonstrated convincing explanatory power and so may be employed for further studies in other contexts. In particular, cultural effects play a key role in contributing to the uniqueness of the model, enabling it to be an effective tool to help critically understand increasingly internationalized IS system development and implementation efforts. This research also suggests several practical implications in view of the findings that could better inform managerial decisions for designing, implementing, or promoting smart card-based E-payment system.

This paper aims to present the findings of an analysis of the environmentally sustainable policies and practices (ESPPs) used by independent and chain-affiliated hotels. The study aimed to ascertain the engagement of hotels with ESPPs and provide tentative evidence of their commitment towards meeting the expectations of environmentally conscious stakeholders.

This study used secondary data and content analysis to examine the ESPPs of a sample of 220 hotels in Melbourne, Australia. A systematic review was conducted of hotel websites to reveal, in a tabulated way, the range of reporting of environmental material provided by various rated hotels.

This analysis suggests that environmentally friendly business practices are prominently displayed by the hotels sampled; however, independent non-chain affiliated hotels are yet to adopt ESPPs in any visible way.

This study was broadly informed by stakeholder theory (Freeman, 1984) and aimed to ascertain the engagement of hotels with ESPPs. While previous studies have focussed on chain hotels, this research involved a greater range of hotels of different profiles to highlight the mix of ESPPs across the hotel sector. Rather than merely examining the corporate websites of hotel companies, the research additionally examined ESPPs at the individual hotel property level, as this is where policies are implemented into practice. The extant literature to date has not studied the extent to which ESPPs are adopted by independent and chain-affiliated hotels at this level, and it is this research gap that the study addresses.

Academic and practitioner attention to the constructs of authentic leadership and work engagement and their implications for organizations has grown dramatically over the past decade. Consideration of the implications of these constructs for high-performance human resource practices (HPHRP) is limited, however. In this monograph, we present a conceptual model that integrates authentic leadership/followership theory with theory and research on HPHRP. Then, we apply this model to systematically consider the implications of skill-enhancing, motivation-enhancing, and opportunity-enhancing HR practices in combination with authentic leadership for authentic followership, follower work engagement, and follower performance. We contend that authentic leadership, through various influences processes, promotes HPHRP, and vice versa, to help foster enhanced work engagement. By cultivating greater work engagement, individuals are motivated to bring their best, most authentic selves to the workplace and are more likely to achieve higher levels of both well-being and performance.