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This exploratory research aims to investigate the barriers to career advancement for women accountants in China.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight accountants working for business companies and occupying different-level positions.

Women accountants in China encounter barriers throughout their career paths. The main barrier is a negative perception of women’s work performance after having a child. Although the modern communist state claims that women have a role equal to that of men in their work contributions, centuries-old Confucian attitudes constrain women in their choices of balance between work and home life.

The findings of this research call for enforcement of employment laws in China to give women equal opportunities in both recruitment and promotion. This research contributes to both Western and Chinese existing literature, confirming some prior findings that are contrary to modern China’s rhetoric that “Women hold up half the sky”. It also adds the perspective of accountants working in business companies rather than public practice accounting firms.

The study aims to draw on the self-congruity theory to investigate the relationship among destination personality (DP), self-congruity and tourists’ pro-environmental behavioral intention (BI) among Guangzhou citizens who have experienced nature-based tourism (NBT).

The survey-based quantitative research was divided into two rounds, namely, a preliminary study exploring the dimensions of DP and the verification of whether the DP dimensions that significantly affect pro-environmental BI in step one would be selected for the main research to validate the conceptual model.

The results suggest that wholesome, one of the destination personalities, strongly predicts tourists’ pro-environmental BI, while actual self-congruity plays a mediating role between sincere, another DP, and tourists’ pro-environmental BI.

In practice, it offers multidimensional knowledge and robust evidence-based recommendations for the sustainable development and destination branding of NBT destinations in the post-epidemic era.

The study presents pioneering work that reveals previously underestimated factors influencing pro-environmental BI.

This paper aims to provide a transaction cost analysis (TCA) perspective to exporting firms' selection of foreign markets and the performance consequences of this international market selection (IMS) decision. This paper proposes a conceptual framework that hypothesizes the relationship between transaction cost factors, IMS and export performance.

This paper tests the proposed framework with a database of Chinese manufacturing firms using regression models and controlling for possible endogeneity. The endogeneity issue may arise due to IMS being influenced by unobserved industrial/firm attributes.

The results show that transaction cost factors are able to explain IMS. Furthermore, firms whose decisions have incorporated transaction cost factors perform significantly better than their rivals.

Understanding transaction costs helps decision-makers formulate more efficient IMS strategy to achieve superior export performance. Future research on IMS may examine “passive exporting”, i.e. exporting initiated by overseas buyers, consider the role of institutional distance and use other approaches toward cultural distance-based IMS.

This study adds a new theoretical underpinning for IMS by developing a framework based on TCA, and thus broadens the applications of TCA into IMS. Our empirical results support this extension.

This study examines the contingent impact of corporate anti-corruption policies on multinational enterprises’ foreign investment strategy. The authors propose that the differences in foreign investment motives will moderate the assumed deterrent effect of anti-corruption policies. Our analysis of overseas production investments by Japanese firms (2011–2017) supports some of the hypotheses. The authors find that the deterrent effect of anti-corruption policies may be diminished when a new subsidiary has an efficiency-seeking purpose. Conversely, the deterrent effect is more prominent when a new subsidiary has a competence-creating purpose. These results not only contribute to the research on control of corruption in international business, but also have implications for research on corporate self-regulation more generally.

Through a systematic review of the literature, this study analyzes the empirical literature on the adoption of environmental sustainability strategies in order to identify (i) the main conceptual aspects by which environmental sustainability strategies can be conceived of, (ii) the main determinants of the adoption of such strategies, (iii) the expected impacts on the company’s international performance, as well as (iv) the mechanisms that mediate the effect of environmental sustainability strategies on international performance. This study thereby offers propositions about the relationships between environmental sustainability strategies, their determinants (both in relation to the institutional environment and to the company’s domain), and their performance implications.

The paper aims to construct a spatiotemporal situational awareness framework to sense the evolutionary situation of public opinion in social media, thus assisting relevant departments in formulating public opinion control measures for specific time and space contexts.

The spatiotemporal situational awareness framework comprises situational element extraction, situational understanding and situational projection. In situational element extraction, the data on the COVID-19 vaccine, including spatiotemporal tags and text contents, is extracted. In situational understanding, the bidirectional encoder representation from transformers – latent dirichlet allocation (BERT-LDA) and bidirectional encoder representation from transformers – bidirectional long short-term memory (BERT-BiLSTM) are used to discover the topics and emotional labels hidden in opinion texts. In situational projection, the situational evolution characteristics and patterns of online public opinion are uncovered from the perspective of time and space through multiple visualisation techniques.

From the temporal perspective, the evolution of online public opinion is closely related to the developmental dynamics of offline events. In comparison, public views and attitudes are more complex and diversified during the outbreak and diffusion periods. From the spatial perspective, the netizens in hotspot areas with higher discussion volume are more rational and prefer to track the whole process of event development, while the ones in coldspot areas with less discussion volume pay more attention to the expression of personal emotions. From the perspective of intertwined spatiotemporal, there are differences in the focus of attention and emotional state of netizens in different regions and time stages, caused by the specific situations they are in.

The situational awareness framework can shed light on the dynamic evolution of online public opinion from a multidimensional perspective, including temporal, spatial and spatiotemporal perspectives. It enables decision-makers to grasp the psychology and behavioural patterns of the public in different regions and time stages and provide targeted public opinion guidance measures and offline event governance strategies.

Drawing on the resource-based view and network theory, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of external networks (ENs) and absorptive capacity (AC) in export market location decision of emerging economy firms (EEFs) and the performance implication of this decision.

This study employs structural equation modeling to test three hypotheses: first, ENs influence an EEF manager's propensity to enter culturally/psychically distant markets for exports. Distant markets are more likely to be chosen by managers of firms with abundant ENs. Second, AC moderates this network-market location relationship. Third, superior performance results from the fit between managers’ propensity to enter a market and firms’ levels of ENs and AC.

An analysis of 196 Chinese exporting firms supports the hypotheses.

Though the theoretical discussion is general, the empirical context is specific to Chinese export manufacturers. Replicating the study is necessary in different contexts.

The study identifies to managers the importance of external (i.e. ENs) and internal resources and capabilities (i.e. AC) and linkages between resources and capabilities, strategy and performance.

The study is novel in conceptually addressing the role of ENs and AC in firms’ decision making and performance and in testing hypotheses with robust methodology and data.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the significance of the direct and indirect effects (through country and firm’s specific advantages) of government policies for export promotion (GPEP) on the export performance of small and medium-size enterprise (SME) Cocoa exporters in Cameroon.

To test the proposed model, data were obtained through self-administered questionnaires using snowball sampling technique to 101 SME Cocoa exporters. This was analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques to examine both the direct and indirect effects of GPEP on the export performance of SME Cocoa exporters in the South and Centre Regions of Cameroon.

The findings suggest that GPEP had both direct and indirect effects on the export performance of SME Cocoa exporters. Direct effect was on the usage of GPEP which reduces operating cost and increase performance. The indirect effects were through the provision of country and firms specific advantages. However, the only significant path was through the provision of export marketing information.

The research is limited to one country, one sector, and two regions and does not take into consideration other factors that may influence the effect of GPEP, country, and firms specific advantages on export performance. Moreover, the non-significant paths should be interpreted with caution and further testing required in a different context.

Empirical findings are relevant for the government and SME Cocoa exporters. It informs the government about the effectiveness of GPEP and the need to disseminate marketing information using every possible medium best understood by the SMEs. It suggests an opportunity for engagement of both SMEs and government authorities in accessing the outcome of GPEP which will increase transparency, awareness, usage, and export performance.

The research has successfully developed and tested a model for analyzing the direct and indirect effects of GPEP on export performance based on the resource-based view and SEM in a context where there is a call for more empirical and theoretical work on export performance due to limited studies. The framework reveals positive effects of GPEP, country, and firms’ specific advantages as determinants of export performance.

The purpose of this paper is to present a new concept – task affordance in crowdsourcing context, and build it as a theoretical lens to help the authors reconfigure the artifacts and process in task-oriented crowdsourcing projects. The paper differs from previous studies by focusing on the relationships between the task artifacts, systems and goal-directed actors in crowdsourcing process rather than on the pure examination of task properties.

An operational definition of task affordance was proposed and a pseudo-entity-relationship model based approach was employed to portrait the task affordance in online crowdsourcing context. Furthermore, the authors developed a typology of task affordance and decomposed the concept into five dimensions, namely, design affordance, presentation affordance, assignment affordance, task-platform fit affordance, and task-worker fit affordance. A preliminary analysis of task affordances across various crowdsourcing categories was also conducted to validate the proposed typological framework.

The findings show that the task affordances have varying degree and extend among the diverse crowdsourcing categories. For instance, task design affordances seem to be low in the crowd processing and crowd rating cases compared with that in the crowd solving and crowd creation cases. For another example, in terms of the task presentation affordance, crowd rating cases need the lowest affordance while the crowd creation cases need the highest affordance. Therefore, the authors would like to emphasize that the successful adoption, implementation, and design of the task-oriented crowdsourcing owes to the careful examination of the relationships among the actors, artifacts, and environment of the crowdsourcing projects.

To the authors’ best knowledge, this paper is the first study on conceptualizing the task affordance in online crowdsourcing context. The study contributes to the academic literature on a comprehensive overview of task-related studies in crowdsourcing, which are scattered in several information related fields. Furthermore, this research contributes directly to the area of information science and technology due to a common interest in studying the environments and contexts in which people, information and technology interact and interplay. Practically, this study may yield some implications for the requester and platform operator when designing the relevant tasks or developing the specific crowdsourcing platform.