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The purpose of this paper is to explore influencing factors that affect the effectiveness of service recovery strategies using social network from operations management perspective. Specifically, the authors study the relationships between social media agent responses to customer complaints, customer emotion changes and customer satisfaction. Furthermore, the authors investigate the roles of recovery speed and failure severity in the service recovery process using social network platform.

The results are based on 347 mini cases drawn from the Twitter accounts of a sample of airlines. Grounded theory approach is used to conduct qualitative analysis using NVivo 9, a qualitative data analysis program. A conceptual framework was developed, then tested using χ² analysis.

Agent responses that do not require customers to take further initiatives for problem solving have positive effects on customer emotion alleviation and satisfaction. In contrast, responses that provide further directions poses negative effect on service recovery outcomes. There is a strong positive linkage between customer emotion change and customer satisfaction. Surprisingly, the direct effect of recovery speed on customer emotion and satisfaction is not supported by the data. Rather, it plays a moderating role in affecting the relationship between agent responses and customer satisfaction. The qualitative data further reveals the pivotal role of failure severity, one of key service failure attributes.

The authors study service businesses’ recovery strategies using social media. A conceptual framework is developed to link agent responses, customer emotion changes and customer satisfaction from the lens of service providers, using an operations-oriented approach. Finding on recovery speed and failure severity reveal that these variables play different roles when service recovery is operated on social media platform as compared to traditional channels. Additionally, relying on tweets as data sources has constrained us from assessing other long-term service recovery outcomes such as loyalty, repurchase intent and word of mouth. The drawback is resulted from the limited information conveyed through tweets, which tends to be short and brief. The study focusses on the airline industry, which limits the generalizability of the findings to other service industries.

The authors highlight the value and potential of service recovery strategies using social network and provide insights for recovery operations where agent responses should be focussing on real time problem solving. The findings support the benefits of empowering social network agents for service recovery operations. Improving recovery speed should be less of a priority as it serves as a qualifier when service recovery is operated via social network. Given the pivotal role of failure severity, it is critical for social network agents to stand in the shoes of the complaining customers, making imminent assessment of the actual failure severity and taking action accordingly in real time. In the meantime, effective communication through social network may help to lower perceived magnitude of failure by customers, which in turn enhance the effectiveness of other service recovery efforts.

This study is the first attempt to investigate the service recovery process using social media from an operations-oriented perspective. The results supports the potentials of employing service recovery strategies using social media.

Promotional events or event marketing is currently at the infant stage in China, but holds great potential for the future. This is concluded from an Internet‐based survey. The respondents believe that event promotion provides international companies with a viable alternative to the increasingly cluttered mass media, and plays a key role in corporate branding and integrated marketing communication. Sponsoring sports and music events is found particularly effective in reaching the opinion leaders and innovators, and establishing favourable links between an audience and a sponsor’s brand image.

The ongoing urbanization and decarbonization require deployment of energy storage in the urban energy system to integrate large-scale variable renewable energy (VRE) into the power grids. The cost reductions of batteries enable private entities to invest energy storage for energy management whose operating strategy may differ from traditional storage facilities. This study aims to investigate the impacts of energy storage on the power system with different operation strategies. Two strategies are modeled through a simulation-based regional economic power dispatch model. The profit-oriented strategy denotes the storage system operated by private entities for price arbitrage, and the nonprofit-oriented strategy denotes the storage system dispatched by an independent system operator (ISO) for the whole power system optimization. A case study of Jiangsu, China is conducted. The results show that the profit-oriented strategy only has a very limited impact on the cost reductions of power system and may even increase the cost for consumers. While nonprofit-oriented energy storage performs a positive effect on the system cost reduction. CO₂ emission reduction can only be achieved under a high VRE scenario for energy storage. Integrating energy storage into the power system may increase CO₂ emissions in the near term. In addition, the peak-valley spread is crucial to trigger operations of profit-oriented energy storage, and the profitability of energy storage operator is observed to be decreasing with the total storage capacity. This study provides new insights for the energy management in the smart city, and the modeling framework can be applied to regions with different resource endowments.

The authors characterize two battery storage operating strategies of profit- and nonprofit-oriented by adopting a simulation-based economic dispatch model. A simulation from 36 years of hourly weather data of wind and solar output from case study of Jiangsu, China is conducted.

The results show that the profit-oriented strategy only has a very limited impact on the cost reductions of power system and may even increase the cost for consumers. While nonprofit-oriented energy storage performs a positive effect on the system cost reduction. CO₂ emission reduction can only be achieved under high VRE scenario for energy storage. Integrating energy storage into the power system may increase CO₂ emissions in the near term. In addition, the peak-valley spread is crucial to trigger operations of profit-oriented energy storage, and the profitability of energy storage operator is observed to be decreasing with the total storage capacity.

This study provides new insights for the energy management in the smart city, and the modeling framework can be applied to regions with different resource endowments.

This article reports an empirical study conducted in 20 British organisations with a focus on the director of corporate communications. It examines the origin and role of corporate communication executives and identifies those essential characteristics that constitute the most successful communication practitioners.

More and more customers refer to online reviews before making any purchasing decisions thanks to the increasing popularity of social media and online shopping. This phenomenon has caught the attention of business managers who are increasingly aware that online reviews provide great opportunities to connect with current and potential customers. However, both practices and research on online review management from the businesses’ perspective are fragmented. The purpose of this paper is to develop an integrative framework that includes the key dimensions of an online review management system.

Based on the Grounded Theory approach, the authors conducted a multiple case study by analyzing the interviews with 11 hospitality services.

The authors found that an online review management system should go beyond the current norm of response management to incorporate key dimensions of formality, centralization, specialization, response customization, integration and review analytics.

The study provides a systematic guideline for online review management practices. The framework can be used as a tool for a business to evaluate existing online review management practices and develop/refine its online review management system.

The study contributes to online review management literature by developing a comprehensive framework to understand the structure and processes of online review management. The key dimensions of an online review management system identified in this study provide an initial measurement model for the online review management construct. Furthermore, the study provides a springboard for future empirical validation and refinement of the key factors for effective online review management.

In complex adaptive system (CAS), the complex behavior of system is emerged from the bottom, that agents’ adaptability bottom‐up the complexity of the entire system. This idea can be simulated by the method of computer aid simulation. SWARM, which is developed by Santa Fe Institute, is such a tools kit based on the bottom‐up modeling method that can be used in CAS simulation on computer. This paper presented a Swarm based simulation platform for the study on complexity in flood disaster. Its application is illustrated with a SWARM based model and program for simulating spatial and temporal emergence of flooding. This model offers virtually unlimited possibilities to simulate the emergence of flooding. Some rules have been elicited from the experimental results, which could provide useful information for the disaster reduction and management.

The purpose of this study is to determine how Western business practitioners, specifically Australian accounting professionals, identify with the Chinese value concept of guanxi and the impact of their perceptions of guanxi on their ethical decision-making. This objective is predicated by a belief that aspects of guanxi are similar to the Western concepts of social networking and would be identified by practitioners as an organizational process providing positive benefits to those associated with its application. Further, it is anticipated that concepts of guanxi influence the way Australian accountants form ethical judgements and intentions, precursors to acceptable moral behaviour.

A cross-sectional questionnaire based on a survey of 111 usable Australian accounting professionals was completed during 2012. A confirmatory factor analysis was used to validate each construct of guanxi before a path analysis was performed.

Australian accounting professionals associate well with the favour-seeking aspects of guanxi, suggesting an affiliation with Western concepts of social networking. Both groups (i.e. public accountants and private accountants) reject rent-seeking guanxi as clearly unethical. Rent-seeking guanxi is seen to directly influence ethical judgement and intention; however, their favour-seeking guanxi attitudes do not influence ethical judgement or intention, regardless of employment type. Public and private accountants apply guanxi in a differential manner when determining moral intention. Public accountants are viewed as acting spontaneously without adequately considering the consequences (via the judgement phase), which appears to be a function of the nature of their personal association with the case study applied in this research.

The research provides evidence that Australian accounting professionals relate to favour-seeking guanxi as representative of a broader notion of social networking. In this context, the guanxi instrument appears to be amenable to cross-cultural evaluations of group behaviour. Significant differences of opinion exist compared to the prior Chinese studies when unethical practices are considered. The guanxi instrument proves to be a useful tool when examining the group interactions involving Western professionals and also helps establish differences in moral constructions based on employment types.

This paper seeks to examine the impact of the gūanxi phenomenon (which is carefully defined) on the management of corporate reputation in China, with particular reference to large‐scale social and economic change there since the turn of the century, and to the role of government in the business sector in modern China.

Conclusions and interpretations are based on an extensive review of published research studies and authoritative commentaries. Selective use is made of case examples featuring familiar multinational companies, to illustrate the key issues.

China remains a hierarchical, gūanxi‐based society despite its rapid transition to a market‐led economy. Today's decentralised business environment is in fact more complicated in various ways than that in the pre‐reform era. Since reputation is relationship‐based, gūanxi networks are an important element of “reputation capital”. The most important stakeholder is still the government, specifically the ruling Communist Party. Multinational marketers need to adopt a strategy that takes due account of national and local culture.

Although the gūanxi phenomenon has been studied extensively, its role in reputation building and promotion has yet to be fully understood.

This paper establishes the link between the two concepts, and provides a departure point for further study of the core concepts or the development of new toolkits for marketing planners.

The findings have added substantially to understanding of interplay between gūanxi and the management of corporate reputation, in China but also by extension elsewhere.

Presents a classification of Chinese Cultural values stating that these can be identified with Chinese people no matter where they live. Creates a new list of 71 core values using the 40 old values listed by the Chinese Cultural Connection in 1987 as its basis. Discusses the implications and limitations of this list.

The purpose of this paper is to further extend research (Fan et al., 2012a) examining the attitudes of Chinese certified public accountants with respect to independence aspects of their professional codes of conduct and their influence on ethical judgement. These attitudes are compared with those of Australian public accountants Particular attention is given to refining a pre-existing instrument to determine measurement invariance.

A field survey of 81 Australian and 516 Chinese public accountants was conducted including the distribution of a questionnaire. Statistical analysis included confirmatory factor analysis and measurement invariance.

An analysis of data established the existence of a stable model for identifying the dimensions of independence of mind and independence in appearance within the context of the codes of conduct relevant to both cultures. Chinese accountants demonstrated significantly less concern about audit-client relationships affecting independence in appearance compared to their Australian counterparts. Interestingly, independence of mind was found to positively influence ethical judgement for both groups taken together, although Chinese accountants were the significant contributors to this model outcome.

The relatively small sample of Australian accountants drawn from a limited population base could influence the quality of data analysis. This paper provides a further research direction for re-examining the relationship between Australian public accountants’ attitudes towards their code of professional ethics and their ethical judgements in a significantly larger sample.

This paper is particularly useful to the profession in that it will provide members with better insights into how accountants in different cultural settings view audit independence issues and their relationships with audit clients. Second, this study offers a scale for measuring attitudes towards codes of professional ethics for further cross-cultural studies.

An exploratory research exercise that indicates that accounting practitioners in divergent cultures demonstrate similar concerns about independence issues, although it is believed that guanxi is likely to explain why Chinese accountants are less concerned with independence of appearance issues. The research also presents a validated instrument for examining attitudes towards codes of ethics.