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Collectivism in service research is so bound with Asian cultures as to risk being overly deterministic. Contesting this stereotype, this paper surfaces the individualistic consumption facets of consumers within a collectivist cultural setting, describing the compensating role servicescapes may play and the service marketing opportunities they present.

Within a Chinese cultural research frame, a qualitative grounded approach is adopted that surfaces subconscious metaphors of private consumption through photo elicitation, deep psychological metaphor elicitation and triangulated with field observation.

Individuals within a collectivist culture do actively seek private psychic space to regenerate the self and prepare for social obligations heavily influenced by Confucian norms. Servicescapes play an important role in private consumption as they provide both a physical and mental oasis of privacy not easily obtainable in regular life and work.

Service providers could offer East Asian consumers a package that includes the individual aspect of their value system, whenever and however they see suitable. More specifically, servicescapes can be designed to provide services that facilitate consumer restoration by implementing the mental metaphors consumers of have this process.

A stereotype of a consumption has grown around Chinese consumers that while not totally false, misses a vital aspect of human values and risks missing profitable market niches. Consideration of the whole person's collective-individualistic cycle benefits both the consumer and the business.

Moving beyond a one-dimensional description of East Asian consumer behavior, focused on collective values, we show the key role servicescapes play in private consumption. A psychological renewal of the self, in preparation to re-enter the collective, show the multiple aspects of Asian consumers.

The study aims to discuss how the attributes of Chinese tea beverage brands influence consumers' evaluations of brand positioning and the differences and competition among brands.

A perceptual map, developed using probabilistic discriminant analysis algorithms, depicts the relative position of each brand and illustrates their attractive properties. This statistical technique can enhance managers' ability to identify promising brand positions and enhance the overall brand design process.

The study finds that Chinese tea beverage brands pursue various goals, such as quenching thirst, attractive advertising, or reliable quality, to develop their positions. Brand positioning implies that consumers remember particular information conveyed by the brand. The study illustrates consumers' brand awareness attributes, potential market demand, and brand competition conditions.

Brand positioning, when linked with market segmentation, can yield effective guidelines for the design and coordination of a marketing strategy. The scope of this study, however, does not enable elaboration on segmented differences in product positioning.

The study provides a useful source of information for managers, who should introduce brands to the market carefully and deliberately and choose a position that is both appealing and sustainable over time.

The study provides a unique method to understand the current market structure and determine a target brand and its best competitive position.

To address the problem of how to guide and promote health knowledge adoption, based on online diabetes communities, this study explores the impact mechanism of social support on users' individual health knowledge adoption to provide insights for online diabetes community management and personal health management.

Integrating the theories of cognitive-affective personality system (CAPS) and social support, this study constructs a theoretical model, collects data through a questionnaire and uses a structural equation model to analyse 356 data.

The results show that: (1) Considering the online diabetes communities, it is reasonable to divide social support into emotional, information, network and respect support. (2) Social support affects individual health knowledge adoption through the intermediaries of knowledge argument quality, knowledge source credibility and positive emotions. (3) The order of the mediating effect of cognitive and emotional factors between social support and health knowledge adoption is knowledge argument quality > knowledge source credibility > positive emotions and rationality > sensibility. (4) Users pay more attention to the source credibility of professional health knowledge than that of experiential health knowledge.

This research expands the application scope of CAPS and opens the “black box” of the impact of social support on individual health knowledge adoption behaviour. Simultaneously, the dimensions of social support and the mediating effect between social support and the two types of health knowledge are discussed.

Building a smart city is a necessary path to achieve sustainable urban development. Smart city public–private partnership (PPP) project is a necessary measure to build a smart city. Since there are many participants in smart city PPP projects, there are problems such as uneven distribution of risks; therefore, in order to ensure the normal construction and operation of the project, the reasonable sharing of risks among the participants becomes an urgent problem to be solved. In order to make each participant clearly understand the risk sharing of smart city PPP projects, this paper aims to establish a scientific and practical risk sharing model.

This paper uses the literature review method and the Delphi method to construct a risk index system for smart city PPP projects and then calculates the objective and subjective weights of each risk index through the Entropy Weight (EW) and G1 methods, respectively, and uses the combined assignment method to find the comprehensive weights. Considering the nature of the risk sharing problem, this paper constructs a risk sharing model for smart city PPP projects by initially sharing the risks of smart city PPP projects through Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to determine the independently borne risks and the jointly borne risks and then determines the sharing ratio of the jointly borne risks based on utility theory.

Finally, this paper verifies the applicability and feasibility of the risk-sharing model through empirical analysis, using the smart city of Suzhou Industrial Park as a research case. It is hoped that this study can provide a useful reference for the risk sharing of PPP projects in smart cities.

In this paper, the authors calculate the portfolio assignment by EW-G1 and construct a risk-sharing model by TOPSIS-Utility Theory (UT), which is applied for the first time in the study of risk sharing in smart cities.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of exploratory innovation on the quality of new product development (NPD), and how do polychronicity of the top management team (TMT) and interfunctional coordination (IFC) moderate the above relationship.

The hypotheses were tested by the survey data of 210 Chinese enterprises. Hierarchical regression analyzes were used to test the hypotheses in this research.

The results indicate that exploratory innovation facilitates NPD quality. TMT polychronicity weakens the effect of exploratory innovation on NPD quality. IFC strengthens the effect of exploratory innovation on NPD quality.

This study provides managers with insight on the relationship between exploratory innovation and NPD quality. To improve NPD quality, managers should be paying more attention to exploratory innovation. Furthermore, this study helps managers to understand how the relationship changes with the increases of TMT polychronicity and IFC.

This study highlights the value of exploratory innovation in increasing NPD quality based on the knowledge-based view. By incorporating TMT polychronicity and IFC based on the attention-based view, it offers much richer understandings of how exploratory innovation affects NPD quality.

The purpose of this paper is to concern the community festival of a Jing minority village in the China–Vietnam border area. Since it was designated as a national-level Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2006, the festival has undergone many changes. The festival has steadily expanded and evolved, assuming characteristics of globalization. How is the globalized character of the Wanwei festival manifested? What are the forces behind the elevation of this local festival onto the register of national events and how did it turn into an event organized by the township?

The paper is based on the results of the author’s research on the culture of Kinh people in Wanwei from 2000 to the present. From the anthropological approach, the author mainly uses method of participant observation and in-depth interviews. The author has observed the Wanwei communal festival from 2000 to the present, interviewing about 40 villagers in Wanwei in depth, they can be leaders, intellectuals, civil servants, officials or working people.

The paper is a case study of the new aspect of globalization of a village festival. The author argues that globalization can lead to a spread of global flows but in this process of globalization, villagers also want to define the local identity, they reinvent the tradition, rewrite history, create new nuances for the gods with many different purposes. Practicing the current Wanwei village festival is a vivid example of globalization from below and the politics of tradition.

The paper adds a theoretical dimension to current globalization research. The paper also points out the political, economic and social dynamics that govern the transformation of a village festival in particular and the village culture in general in the border areas. The paper is a testament to the dynamism and flexibility of villagers when participating in the current globalization process.

This paper aims to examine the unique Chinese context by analyzing the city labels (e.g. smart city and eco city) used by Chinese local governments at or above the provincial capital level to represent themselves (adopted city labels) and the developmental pathways they actually pursued (adopted developmental pathways).

The authors compared the city brand choices to those anticipated based on their geographic and economic contexts (predicted city labels and developmental pathways) as well as the directives outlined in national planning documents (imposed city labels and developmental pathways). The authors identified ten main categories of city labels used to designate themselves and establish the frequency of their use based on municipal plan documents, economic and geographic data and national plan documents and policy reports, respectively.

The authors discovered that both local economic development and geographic factors, as well as top-down administrative influences, significantly impact city branding strategies in the 38 Chinese cities studied. When these models fall short in predicting adopted city labels and pathways, it is often because cities favor a service-oriented reputation over a manufacturing-focused one, and they prefer diverse, multifaceted industrial images to uniform ones.

The originality and value of this paper lie in its contribution to the academic literature on city branding by developing a predictive model for brand development at the municipal level, with explicit attention to the national-local nexus. The paper’s approach differs from existing research in the first cluster of city branding by not addressing issues of stakeholder involvement or adoption and implementation processes. Additionally, the paper’s focus on the political power dynamics at the national level and urban governance details at the municipal level provides a unique perspective on the topic. Overall, this paper provides a valuable contribution to the field of city branding by expanding the understanding of brand development and its impact on the socioeconomic environment.

In the rapidly evolving digital economy, businesses face formidable pressures to maintain their competitive standing, prompting a surge of interest in the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and digital transformation (DT). This study aims to assess the impact of AI technologies on corporate DT by scrutinizing 3,602 firm-year observations listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges. The research delves into the extent to which investments in AI drive DT, while also investigating how this relationship varies based on firms' ownership structure.

To explore the influence of AI technologies on corporate DT, the research employs robust quantitative methodologies. Notably, the study employs multiple validation techniques, including two-stage least squares (2SLS), propensity score matching and an instrumental variable approach, to ensure the credibility of its primary findings.

The investigation provides clear evidence that AI technologies can accelerate the pace of corporate DT. Firms strategically investing in AI technologies experience faster DT enabled by the automation of operational processes and enhanced data-driven decision-making abilities conferred by AI. Our findings confirm that AI integration has a significant positive impact in propelling DT across the firms studied. Interestingly, the study uncovers a significant divergence in the impact of AI on DT, contingent upon firms' ownership structure. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) exhibit a lesser degree of DT following AI integration compared to privately owned non-SOEs.

This study contributes to the burgeoning literature at the nexus of AI and DT by offering empirical evidence of the nexus between AI technologies and corporate DT. The investigation’s examination of the nuanced relationship between AI implementation, ownership structure and DT outcomes provides novel insights into the implications of AI in the diverse business contexts. Moreover, the research underscores the policy significance of supporting SOEs in their DT endeavors to prevent their potential lag in the digital economy. Overall, this study accentuates the imperative for businesses to strategically embrace AI technologies as a means to bolster their competitive edge in the contemporary digital landscape.

The main aim of this study is to investigate the impact of climate change and water salinity on farmer’s income risk with future outlook mitigation. Salinity and climate change are a threat to agricultural productivity worldwide. However, the combined effects of climate change and salinity impacts on farmers' income are not well understood, particularly in developing countries.

The response-yield function and general maximum entropy methods were used to predict the impact of temperature, precipitation and salinity on crop yield. The target minimization of total absolute deviations (MOTAD)-positive mathematical programming model was used to simulate the impact of climate change and salinity on socioeconomic and environmental indicators. In the end, a multicriteria decision-making model was used, aiming at the selection of suitable climate scenarios.

The results revealed that precipitation shows a significantly decreasing trend, while temperature and groundwater salinity (EC) illustrate a significantly increasing trend. Climate change and EC negatively impact the farmer's income and water shadow prices. Maximum reduction in income and water shadow prices was observed for A2 scenario (−12.4% and 19.4%) during 2050. The environmental index was the most important, with priority of 43.4% compared to socioeconomic indicators. Subindex amount of water used was also significant in study area, with 28.1% priority. The technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution ranking system found that B1 was the best climatic scenario for adopting climate change adaptation in the research region.

In this study, farmers' income threats were assessed with the aspects of different climate scenario (A1, A1B and B1) over the horizons of 2030, 2040 and 2050 and three different indicators (economic, social and environmental) in Northwestern region of Pakistan. Only in arid and semiarid regions has climate change raised temperature and reduced rainfall, which are preliminary symptoms of growing salinity.

The purpose of this study is to reduce the use of Zinc dialkyl dithiophosphates (ZDDP) and improve the frictional properties and thermal oxidation stability of Perfluoropolyether (PFPE) grease by adding antioxidant additives. The addition of antioxidants can reduce the consumption of ZDDP as an antioxidant, thus improving the anti-wear efficiency of ZDDP and reducing the excess phosphorus element in the grease.

In this study, an antioxidant with good comprehensive performance was selected from several antioxidants by tribological tests and high-temperature tests. Then, the effect of its combination additive with ZDDP on PFPE grease was investigated. The anti-wear property, anti-friction property, thermal oxidation stability and extreme pressure property of greases containing different proportions of ZDDP and antioxidant were tested by four-ball tester and synchronous thermal analyzer (STA). The effects of additives on properties of grease were analyzed by SEM, EDS, LSCM, XPS and FT-IR.

The research shows that 2,6-Di-tert-butyl-4-methylphenol (BHT) can be used as an antioxidant in combined additives to reduce the antioxidant reactions of ZDDP, thus improving the anti-wear efficiency of ZDDP and further enhancing the anti-wear performance of the grease. Moreover, BHT and ZDDP have a synergistic effect on the high temperature performance of the PFPE grease due to their different antioxidant mechanisms.

In this paper, the problems related to PFPE grease are studied, which has a certain guiding effect on the industrial application of fluorine grease and the related formulation design.

In this paper, the properties of PFPE grease under different lubricating condition were studied. The synergistic lubrication effect of antioxidant and ZDDP are discussed. It provides experimental and theoretical support for reducing the content of ZDDP and improving the performance of additives.