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This article analyzes the implementation of anti-corruption reforms in Taiwan by two former presidents, Chen Shui-bian (2000-2008) and Ma Ying-jeou (2008-2016).

A three-tier research approach, including in-depth interviews, questionnaire survey, and descriptive and inferential analysis, is adopted. In addition to Chen and Ma, 11 senior anti-corruption officials who served under both presidents were interviewed by the author. The survey questions cover 12 factors which are later grouped into the five dimensions of ethical leadership, considerate leadership, delegating leadership, participatory leadership, and performance to illustrate the causal relationship between these dimensions and performance.

Ma’s personal ethics are distinct from Chen’s in kind but Ma’s overall leadership and performance outshine Chen’s in degree rather than in kind. While the gap of ethical leadership between two Taiwan presidents is significantly wider than other dimensions of leadership, the outcome of the national integrity is not proportionate to the ethical leadership gap. In other words, personal ethics are not automatically transformed into political will for enhancing anti-corruption effectiveness. Three popular forms of corruption, red envelopes (bribing), influence-peddling, and vote-buying are analyzed in the context of changing political culture through national leadership. Unfortunately, both Chen and Ma produce insignificant contributions based on public surveys.

Policy-makers and scholars can use these research findings to further explore how ethical leadership can enhance a country’s anti-corruption performance.

Based on theories related to coopetition, the purpose of this paper is to examine the patterns of business-to-business digital referrals inscribed in businesses’ digital content.

A complete industry-wise digital data set is formed by extracting digital referrals in all the content pages. The authors outline how digital referrals are strategically used among peer businesses in the peer-to-peer digital network and in the augmented digital network, taking into consideration geographical framing and physical distance.

The authors reveal how geographical framing and physical distance influence peer-to-peer referral patterns in the digital space. Quite counter-intuitively, businesses are more likely to give digital referrals for peers residing in the same region, as well as for peers located in closer proximity. Further, results from the augmented digital network show that peer businesses in closer proximity exhibit greater strategic similarity in their digital referring strategy.

The findings extend the understanding of business-to-business coopetition to the digital space and suggest that geographical framing and physical distance can induce reciprocated relationships between peers by offering each other digital referrals.

The findings shed light on the formation of a business-to-business digital coopetition strategy using digital referral marketing.

This study highlights the impact of digital referrals in business-to-business relationship management, especially in the digital coopetition context.

In the presence of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), due to the social distance restriction, consumers' regular consumption behaviors and patterns have been changing fundamentally. Thereafter, an innovative group buying model has emerged and developed explosively with a specific focus on consumer's location, known as community-based group buying (CGB). The purpose of this paper is to investigate the transfer mechanism of user's trust in dyadic contexts of social and commercial role-playing in the CGB program.

This study adopts an empirical research method, with an online and offline questionnaire survey, a total of 382 responses have been obtained. Then, both descriptive analysis and hierarchical regression analysis are conducted to explore the dual roles of group leader and its corresponding effects on consumers' trust (i.e. emotional trust and behavioral trust) and engagement actions (i.e. purchase and share) in the CGB program.

Results indicate that resident's trust and their perception of group leader's friend role can positively enhance their engagement actions in the CGB programs. Meanwhile, for the purpose of profit maximization, the group leader is more willing to play a friend role in transactions no matter whether the role conflict exists.

Research findings provide some managerial insights for CGB platform on the selection and training of group leaders and the incentive mechanism design.

This study investigates the relationships among digital transformation, technological innovation, industry–university–research collaborations and labor income share in manufacturing firms.

The relationships are tested using an empirical method, constructing regression models, by collecting 1,240 manufacturing firms and 9,029 items listed on the A-share market in China from 2013 to 2020.

The results indicate that digital transformation has a positive effect on manufacturing companies’ labor income share. Technological innovation can mediate the effect of digital transformation on labor income share. Industry–university–research cooperation can positively moderate the promotion effect of digital transformation on labor income share but cannot moderate the mediating effect of technological innovation. Heterogeneity analysis also found that firms without service-based transformation and nonstate-owned firms are better able to increase their labor income share through digital transformation.

This study provides a new path to increase the labor income share of enterprises to achieve common prosperity, which is important for manufacturing enterprises to better transform and upgrade to achieve high-quality development.

This study aims to explore how to overcome and address the loss of exploratory innovation, thereby achieving greater success in exploratory innovation. This phenomenon of loss occurs when enterprises decrease their investment in and engagement with exploratory innovation, ultimately leading to an insufficient amount of such innovation efforts. Drawing on dynamic capabilities, this study investigates the relationship between organizational foresight and exploratory innovation and examines the moderating role of breakthrough orientation/financial orientation.

This study used survey data collected from 296 Chinese high-tech companies in multiple industries and sectors.

The evidence produced by this study reveals that three elements of organizational foresight (i.e. environmental scanning capabilities, strategic selection capabilities and integrating capabilities) positively influence exploratory innovation. Furthermore, this positive effect is strengthened in the context of a high-breakthrough orientation. Moreover, the relationships among environmental scanning capabilities, strategic selection capabilities and exploratory innovation become weaker as an enterprise’s financial orientation increases, whereas a strong financial orientation does not affect the relationship between integrating capabilities and exploratory innovation.

Ambidexterity is key to successful enterprise innovation. Compared with exploitative innovation, it is by no means easy to engage in exploratory innovation, which is especially important in high-tech companies. While the loss of exploratory innovation has been observed, few empirical studies have explored ways to promote exploratory innovation more effectively. A key research implication of this study pertains to the role of organizational foresight in the improvement of exploratory innovation in the context of high-tech companies.

This paper contributes to the broader literature on exploratory innovation and organizational foresight and provides practical guidance for high-tech companies regarding ways of avoiding the loss of exploratory innovation and becoming more successful at exploratory innovation.

This exploratory study aims to help contribute to the understanding of online information search behaviour of PhD students from different humanities fields, with a focus on subject searching.

The methodology is based on a semi-structured interview within which the participants are asked to conduct both a controlled search task and a free search task. The sample comprises eight PhD students in several humanities disciplines at Linnaeus University, a medium-sized Swedish university from 2020.

Most humanities PhD students in the study have received training in information searching, but it has been too basic. Most rely on web search engines like Google and Google Scholar for publications' search, and university's discovery system for known-item searching. As these systems do not rely on controlled vocabularies, the participants often struggle with too many retrieved documents that are not relevant. Most only rarely or never use disciplinary bibliographic databases. The controlled search task has shown some benefits of using controlled vocabularies in the disciplinary databases, but incomplete synonym or concept coverage as well as user unfriendly search interface present hindrances.

The paper illuminates an often-forgotten but pervasive challenge of subject searching, especially for humanities researchers. It demonstrates difficulties and shows how most PhD students have missed finding an important resource in their research. It calls for the need to reconsider training in information searching and the need to make use of controlled vocabularies implemented in various search systems with usable search and browse user interfaces.

This paper aims to explore stakeholder perspectives of the role of a campus eco-garden in education for sustainability (EfS). It will combine the perspectives to highlight a powerful learning environment (PLE) for university students to realize the concept of EfS.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted to reveal stakeholder understandings of a campus eco-garden, as well as its associated expectations of learning activities and education outcomes. Three stakeholder groups were interviewed; designers, educators and environmental and non-environmental subject-related students.

All three stakeholder groups expected cognitive learning of EfS to be enhanced by the eco-garden. The use of affective learning was not strongly expected by the stakeholders. Psychomotor learning was believed to be the most difficult to realize. To fulfill the potential of the eco-garden in EfS, all stakeholders suggested learning activities and roles for both students and teachers. The combined perspectives of the stakeholders helped to visualize a PLE to aid EfS.

This study underlines the importance of effective communication of expectations between stakeholders. It underlines the importance of integrating educational activities with the eco-garden as a PLE, highlighting the roles of teachers and students. It also sheds light on the importance of introducing a cultural component to the EfS program.

This is the first study to apply the PLE theory to enhance EfS with the aid of infrastructure. Both users and designers reveal their views on the planning of the campus eco-garden, especially in its educational function. The study is possibly the first to reveal the differences in expectations between designers and other stakeholder groups (teachers and students) using Könings et al.’s (2005) combination-of-perspectives model.

Artificial intelligence (AI)-based chatbots have brought unprecedented business potential. This study aims to explore consumers' trust and response to a text-based chatbot in e-commerce, involving the moderating effects of task complexity and chatbot identity disclosure.

A survey method with 299 useable responses was conducted in this research. This study adopted the ordinary least squares regression to test the hypotheses.

First, the consumers' perception of both the empathy and friendliness of the chatbot positively impacts their trust in it. Second, task complexity negatively moderates the relationship between friendliness and consumers' trust. Third, disclosure of the text-based chatbot negatively moderates the relationship between empathy and consumers' trust, while it positively moderates the relationship between friendliness and consumers' trust. Fourth, consumers' trust in the chatbot increases their reliance on the chatbot and decreases their resistance to the chatbot in future interactions.

Adopting the stimulus–organism–response (SOR) framework, this study provides important insights on consumers' perception and response to the text-based chatbot. The findings of this research also make suggestions that can increase consumers' positive responses to text-based chatbots.

Extant studies have investigated the effects of automated bots' attributes on consumers' perceptions. However, the boundary conditions of these effects are largely ignored. This research is one of the first attempts to provide a deep understanding of consumers' responses to a chatbot.

This paper aims to explore the relationship between top management team bricolage and performance and also examines unit ambidexterity's mediating role. More essentially, to understand the black box of organizational knowledge dynamism, a multilevel moderated mediating model is established by exploring the effects of two firm-level moderators, namely, potential absorptive capacity and realized absorptive capacity.

To test the cross-level moderated mediation model, this study used multisource data from 90 R&D units in 45 Taiwanese manufacturing firms through two-wave surveys and retrieving the archival data for assessing unit performance.

This study’s evidence revealed that unit-level ambidexterity mediates the effect between firm-level top management teams’ (TMT) bricolage and unit-level performance. This study also found that firm-level potential absorptive capacity positively moderates the effect between firm-level TMT bricolage and unit-level ambidexterity. Moreover, firm-level realized absorptive capacity strengthens the indirect relationships between firm-level TMT bricolage and unit-level performance via unit-level ambidexterity. The findings shed light on how and why TMT bricolage influences unit ambidexterity and performance in knowledge-intensive sectors.

This paper adds to the existing knowledge-based theory literature by disentangling the association between top management team bricolage and unit performance and identifying the pivotal role of absorptive capacity at both the firm and unit levels.

In 2022, the International Network for Quality Assurance (QA) Agencies in Higher Education (INQAAHE) published the new guidelines by adding three QA modules in response to the changing higher education landscape. The paper aims to investigate the transformative focus of quality assurance in higher education globally as well as Asian response to three new QA modules according to the INQAAHE ISGs.

The research conducted a quantitative approach for data collection. An on-line survey was conducted to perceive QA practices, perceptions toward new emerging QA modules and challenges encountered. In total, there were 26 responses from 18 territories with 22 QA agencies. A total of 13 out of them have a national qualifications framework in place.

Three are three major findings in the study. First, national policy and criteria and standards in distance education have been developed in the majority of Asian nations. Second, non-signatories of the Tokyo Convention had a higher proportion of having related policies, regulations and criteria in CBHE and distance education. Third, national policies and regulations; and lack of professional staff are two common challenges implementing QA in new types of providers.

The findings are of value for policymakers, QA agencies and universities to advocate the new QA model as a systematic approach in response to changing higher education landscape in the post pandemic era.