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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of four components of social capital on farmers’ participative behaviour in collective actions for constructing and operating small-scale groundwater irrigation systems on the Guanzhong Plain, Shaanxi Province, China.

The four components (social networks, social trust, social reciprocity and social participation) were derived by employing exploratory factor analysis. Logistic model was used to estimate the influence of these components on farmers’ participative behaviour. Information was obtained from a field survey covering six counties in 2011 of Shaanxi Province, China.

The findings indicate that considering different components of social capital allows for a better understanding of farmers’ participative behaviour. The authors find that higher levels of social trust and social participation lead to a higher propensity for collective action, while social reciprocity reduces the probability of participation. Other socio-economic factors and farming characteristics such as education levels, cultivated area, cropping patterns and grain subsidies also have a significant impact.

The findings suggest creating favourable conditions for communication and information exchanges between households, which enhance their trust of each other, and encourage farmers to participate in collective affairs. Moreover, supportive rules are necessary for the future development of collective action. The results of this study also have implications for national irrigation plans for small-scale irrigation facilities in other developing countries.

A consideration of the different components of social capital allows for a more precise understanding of farmers’ participative behaviour.

The concept of sustainability in general and food sustainability, in particular, entails many aspects and many interpretations. During a conference on food sustainability a broad, multidisciplinary picture was painted and many key issues were dealt with, from ecology, economy and society. In sessions on food security – the focus in developing countries – and food safety – primarily a preoccupation in developed countries – many potential trade‐offs and opportunities for regional approaches were identified. The session on governance, therefore, focused on the interaction between multi‐level actors, including national governments, international organisations such as WTO, the food industry and consumers. Finally, transparency was identified as one of the main issues underlying good governance. In order to improve the sustainability of food production, therefore, it was considered of the utmost importance that food multinationals transfer some form of democratic control over their global environmental policies, as part of an overall multi‐level (public‐private) governance ideal.

The purpose of this paper is to select the optimal feature parameters to further improve the identification accuracy of cashmere and wool.

To increase the accuracy, the authors put forward a method selecting optimal parameters based on the fusion of morphological feature and texture feature. The first step is to acquire the fiber diameter measured by the central axis algorithm. The second step is to acquire the optimal texture feature parameters. This step is mainly achieved by using the variance of secondary statistics of these two texture features to get four statistics and then finding the impact factors of gray level co-occurrence matrix relying on the relationship between the secondary statistic values and the pixel pitch. Finally, the five-dimensional feature vectors extracted from the sample image are fed into the fisher classifier.

The improvement of identification accuracy can be achieved by determining the optimal feature parameters and fusing two texture features. The average identification accuracy is 96.713% in this paper, which is very helpful to improve the efficiency of detector in the textile industry.

In this paper, a novel identification method which extracts the optimal feature parameter is proposed.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a brand-new phenomenon in customer consumption patterns. This resulted from heightened health awareness brought on by the COVID-19 epidemic. There is a dearth of appropriate health psychology perspectives in the existing study examining the effect of COVID-19 on consumers’ use of crowdsourced logistics (CL) platforms. In order to provide unique and thorough insights into how consumer health concerns can affect consumers’ subjective views and their decisions to use CL, this study combines the health belief model and the technology acceptance model.

Five hundred valid responses from an online survey that was created and administered in Singapore were analysed using structural equation modelling.

The findings show that all of the suggested constructs have a favourable influence on consumers’ intentions to use CL. The suggested model also demonstrates high explanatory power, with perceived usefulness serving as the primary driver, followed by perceived ease of use and self-efficacy.

The study advances previous academic research on CL and offers guidance to CL companies and lawmakers for promoting sustainable and secured last-mile delivery.

Sailing toward sustainability is becoming the strategic focus of shipping firms. Drawing on organizational information processing theory (OIPT) and the theory of planned behavior (TPB), we investigated the impact of digital transformation (DT) on shipping firms’ sustainable management performance and the boundary conditions guiding this relationship.

The authors examined the hypotheses by employing hierarchical linear modeling on two-wave time-lagged data from 189 shipping firm employees in China.

The results suggest that a shipping firm’s DT is positively associated with its sustainable management performance and that the relationship is strengthened by having better cross-functional and customer coordination mechanisms. Furthermore, our three-way interaction analyses show that while injunctive norms in a shipping firm’s networks can strengthen the contingency roles of both cross-functional and customer coordination mechanisms, descriptive norms alone significantly influence customer coordination.

Drawing on organizational information processing and planned behavior theories, the present research provides new insights into leveraging DT for sailing toward sustainable success. Moreover, this study extends the current understandings of the boundary conditions of the relationship between DT and sustainable management performance by showing the two-way and three-way interaction effects of coordination mechanisms and subjective norms. The findings of the present research can be utilized as effective strategies for promoting sustainable management performance.

Service conveniences (SCs) play a deterministic role in motivating consumers’ participation in self-collection (via attended pickup points or unattended automated locker systems). Accordingly, the SERVCON model provides a multi-dimensional conceptualisation of SCs, whereas the Kano model explains consumers’ satisfaction formation in response to multi-dimensional service attributes. Anchored on synthesised insights of both models, the purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to qualitatively apply the SC concept to develop specific service attributes of self-collection; and second, to quantitatively examine these attributes in relation to consumers’ satisfaction formation.

A quantitative Kano model is adopted for survey questionnaire design and data analysis, and 500 valid responses are obtained from an online panel of respondents in Singapore.

SCs are decomposed into 11 service attributes reflecting access, benefit, transaction and post-benefit conveniences of self-collection services. Distinctive patterns of satisfaction formation are revealed in response to specific service attributes; for example, consumers are most responsive to improvement in transaction convenience. Furthermore, as service performance level increases, benefits of spatial accessibility diminish, whereas those of temporal accessibility increase.

This study reveals key service attributes influencing the self-collection services’ convenience and impact on consumers’ satisfaction. Guidelines are presented for designing an optimal resource allocation strategy for logistics service providers to promote self-collection services.

This study synthesises diverse logistics literature on self-collection services under the central theme of SCs, thus enriching the conceptual development of SCs with a decomposed framework of logistics service attributes.

Crowd logistics is a rising phenomenon in last-mile delivery that integrates technological applications and sources a large number of participants to do logistical activities, achieving sustainable shipping in urban environments. However, up until now, there has been limited literature in this field. This research aims to investigate the extrinsic and intrinsic factors that impact the participative behaviour of driver-partners in crowd logistics.

An integrated model is developed based on motivation theory, incorporating attitude as a contributor to both extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. A questionnaire was constructed and distributed to collect data from 303 respondents who are existing or potential driver-partners in Vietnam.

Our findings confirm (1) the influence of monetary rewards on extrinsic motivation and (2) the power of self-efficacy, trust and sense of belonging on intrinsic motivation. Further, we find that attitude positively impacts extrinsic motivation, whereas there is no effect between attitude and intrinsic motivation. Both extrinsic and intrinsic motivations are demonstrated to significantly influence driver-partners' participative intentions. Additionally, a positive association is found between extrinsic and intrinsic motivations.

Findings from this study theoretically enrich the literature on crowd logistics, especially on the supply side, and empirically contribute to implications that are valuable to crowd logistics firms on driver-partner recruitment and business strategy development.

This study investigated the differential effects of empowering leadership and directive leadership in projects. Moreover, how the complex interplay between empowering and directive leadership styles influences both leader–member exchange and project performance was also explored.

Polynomial regression analysis and response surface modeling were applied to analyze 161 matched data collected from project members and managers worked in different projects located in China.

Four leadership styles were identified, i.e. ambidextrous, delegating, directive and laissez-faire styles. These may be combined with empowering and directive leadership. With regard to (in)congruence, leader–member exchange and project performance improved with ambidextrous style as a form of high–high congruence between empowering and directive leadership compared with laissez-faire style (i.e. low–low congruence). Results were better when a delegating style was combined with empowering leadership at a high level compared with the combination of directive style as directive leadership at a high level. Leader–member exchange was identified to exert a mediating role of the (in)congruence on project performance.

This study confirmed the contingent viewpoint of leadership by identifying distinct leadership styles applied in projects. Furthermore, the co-existence of empowering leadership and directive leadership was examined, and the underlying mechanism between the (in)congruence of empowering and directive leadership and project performance was identified.

Following the conservation of resources theory and job demands–resources model, this study aims to explore the relationship between work interference with family (WIF) and emotional exhaustion and the boundary condition for construction professionals.

This study collected 319 valid samples from Chinese construction projects and examined the established integrative moderated mediation model using regression analysis and bootstrapping.

The results indicated that WIF was positively related to emotional exhaustion. The surface acting strategy mediated the relationship between WIF and emotional exhaustion. Emotional intelligence alleviated the indirect effect of WIF on emotional exhaustion via surface acting.

These findings unveil the resource depletion process of work–family conflict in the construction project context, enrich the emotional intelligence literature to demonstrate the buffer function on the negative impact of emotional resource depletion and address the implications for the construction labour workforce.

Logistics at work is rapidly changing. The changing trend is especially prominent when considering the active involvement of individuals that perform diverse forms of formal/informal “logistics work” (e.g. crowd logistics and self-collection). Thus, by conducting a synthesised review (n = 55), this study aims to provide a typology of individuals' logistics work.

The total social organisation of labour is used as a guiding framework. A deductive literature analysis is performed based on the identified journal articles.

The review findings reveal three major contexts where individuals perform logistics work: formal organisation, social community and private household, with a decreased level of formality. Under each context, individuals may be engaged in paid or unpaid activities, creating six forms of logistics work, termed as paid/voluntary professional logistics, incentivised/friendly social logistics and rewarded/free consumer logistics. Furthermore, an actor–sphere–resource–value conceptualisation of individual logistics is proposed, focussing on the chains of actors, work settings, resource input and value outcome.

The results provide a theoretical foundation for further research in individual- or consumer-centrism in logistics. Two research directions and seven research questions are presented for future investigation.