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China has witnessed the emergence and rapid development of private higher education in the past three decades. As private higher education gradually takes on a more significant role in the Chinese educational system, due to the inability of the government to accommodate the growing demand for higher education, educational reform, influenced by the success of private higher education, will inevitably affect the quality and quantity of education overall.

This chapter focuses on several aspects of this development: the growth of private higher education in China, issues of finance and access, its relationship to the national system and to government policy, issues of ownership and the autonomy of private higher education, as well as the advantages and challenges of Chinese private higher education and the larger significance of its emergence in China. This study concludes that with proper management private colleges and universities will benefit from and contribute to Chinese society through multiple roles and responsibilities at their mature stage.

Tingting Qi's chapter titled, “Moving toward Decentralization? Changing Education Governance in China After 1985,” provides the historical and policy context for the volume. This chapter integrates the post-1978 Chinese educational reforms into the socioeconomic context of China. The special contribution of this chapter is that it explores the complexity of educational decentralization in China through an in-depth analysis of changes in education finance, administration, and curriculum. Qi reviews prior studies, government documents, laws, and regulations related to Chinese education reform since 1978 within the context of education decentralization in China. Qi also demonstrates that China's educational policy reforms are moving China toward “centralized decentralization” because decentralization is driven by a common, centralized national goal of economic modernization. The chapter presents evidence that “centralized decentralization” is a strategic maneuver that maintains centralized control while providing the reform legitimacy of decentralization. By focusing on decentralization as the core of Chinese educational policy reforms, this chapter situates the following chapters within the social, cultural, and political context of post-1978 China.

Chentong Chen is an undergraduate at Nanjing Normal University studying law and English. She has research interests in education policy, education assessment and evaluation, and child development. She is currently working on two research projects: policy issues related to the college entrance exam in China, and theories and practice of preschool assessment in the U.S.

This case describes a real-time crisis experienced by the co-founder (Mr Yang) of a multi-national Chinese company operating in Vietnam during the 2014 Vietnam riot. After the strike broke out, Mr Yang made several critical decisions to protect and save both his factory and employees.

This case is applicable to graduate-level management courses such as: Business ethics, Decision-making, Business Communication and Cross-Cultural Management. Students should have some knowledge in Decision-Making concepts (e.g. “bounded rationality”); in Cross-Cultural Management concepts (e.g. “culture norms”); and in Strategic management theory such as “institution-based view” (e.g. formal vs informal institutions).

Part A of the case introduces the main character (Mr Yang) and his factory in Vietnam, the escalation of the strike and the course of the crisis. It also elaborates the important critical decisions Mr Yang made to save both his factory and employees. Part B of the case describes the rescue of Mr Yang and his Chinese employees, his actions after the crisis and strategic positioning in future business. Part C of the case introduces the aftermath of the riot and Mr Yang's reflection regarding the crisis.

The instructors may emphasize different learning objectives in different courses. Business Ethics: help the students learn to recognize, clarify, speak and act on their values when conflicts arise. Decision-Making: helps the students understand the logic of sense-making in crisis and the concept of bounded rationality. Business Communication: helps the students learn to raise issues in an effective manner and learn to deliver their own responses effectively. Cross-Cultural Management: helps the students identify and analyze the many ways in which managers can voice and implement their values in the face of critical moments in a different cultural environment.

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This study investigated why employees' cyberloafing behavior is affected by their coworkers' cyberloafing behavior. By integrating social learning theory and deterrence theory, the authors developed a model to explain the role of employees' perceived certainty of formal and informal sanctions in understanding the effect of coworkers' cyberloafing behavior on employees' cyberloafing behavior.

The authors conducted a survey that involved a two-stage data collection process (including 293 respondents) to test our developed model. Mplus 7.0 was used to analyze the data.

The results revealed that employees' cyberloafing was positively affected by their coworkers' cyberloafing both directly and indirectly. The indirect effect of coworkers' cyberloafing on employees' cyberloafing was mediated by the employees' perceived certainty of formal and informal sanctions on cyberloafing. Employees' perceived certainty of formal and informal sanctions were found to mediate the relationship both separately (each type of sanctions mediates the relationship individually) and in combination (the two types of sanctions form a serial mediation effect).

The study reveals an important mechanism – employees’ perceived certainty of formal and informal sanctions – that underlies the relationship between coworkers' cyberloafing and employees' cyberloafing, thus, contributing to the cyberloafing literature. It also demonstrates the importance of negative reinforcement (perceived sanctions) in the social learning process, which contributes to the literature on social learning theory because previous studies have primarily focused on the role of positive reinforcement. Lastly, the study reveals a positive relationship between employees' perceived certainty of formal sanctions and informal sanctions, which has important implications for deterrence theory.

E-commerce live streaming (ELS) has become a new and important shopping channel. Although previous studies have provided insightful findings on how to engage consumers in ELS, limited effort has been made to explore the role of factors of live streaming rooms. Based on the literature on space perception and the retail environment, this study aims to develop a theoretical model to examine how perceived distance and perceived depth affect consumers' affective and cognitive perceptions and then further impact product attitude in ELS.

This study collected 414 valid survey responses to test the proposed research model. Survey data were analyzed using partial least squares (PLS)-structural equation modeling. The PLS Multi-Group analysis (PLS-MGA) was used to test the consistency of the research model across different product types and watching durations.

The results suggest that environmental factors of a live streaming room (i.e. perceived distance and perceived depth) can impact consumers' attitudes toward the product in the live streaming via both cognitive and affective routes. These effects keep consistent across different product types and watching durations.

The paper focuses on the environmental perspective, which is unexplored in previous literature on ELS. It highlights the importance of the space design of live streaming rooms.

Knowledge sharing in online health communities (OHCs) disrupts consumers' health information-seeking behavior patterns such as seeking health information and consulting. Based on social exchange theory, this study explores how the two dimensions of experts' free knowledge sharing (general and specific) affect customer transactional and nontransactional engagement behavior and how the quality of experts' free knowledge sharing moderates the above relationships.

We adopted negative binomial regression models using homepage data of 2,982 experts crawled from Haodf.com using Python.

The results show that experts' free general knowledge sharing and free specific knowledge sharing positively facilitate both transactional and nontransactional engagement of consumers. The results also demonstrate that experts' efforts in knowledge-sharing quality weaken the positive effect of their knowledge-sharing quantity on customer engagement.

This study provides new insights into the importance of experts' free knowledge sharing in OHCs. This study also revealed a “trade-off” between experts' knowledge-sharing quality and quantity. These findings could help OHCs managers optimize knowledge-sharing recommendation mechanisms to encourage experts to share more health knowledge voluntarily and improve the efficiency of healthcare information dissemination to promote customer engagement.

Career burnout is prevalent in the PR industry, precisely when demand for professionals is increasing. While career burnout has been included in studies and theorising on professionalism and feminisation, issues with turnover and burnout remain.

Using a grounded theory approach, this qualitative study draws upon the lived experiences of 30 current and former female Australian PR professionals to gain an understanding of how they perceive signs of career burnout and the factors that contribute to it.

Career burnout is an occupational syndrome whereby someone gradually morphs from being highly motivated in their role to emotionally exhausted, cynical and/or experiencing feelings of failure. It is a protracted response to chronic workplace demands and stressors, and includes three dimensions: emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation and reduced personal accomplishment. It is specifically a workplace phenomenon, distinguished from anxiety and depression, which can emerge in any context.

A key contributor to career burnout were PR-specific workplace stressors that were perceived to stem from a lack of respect for, or understanding of, PR as a profession. The stressors included the need to‘prove the spend’of PR, unreasonable deadlines, clients disregarding advice or counsel, as well as broader societal perceptions of PR as ‘spin doctors’. This often led to the PR practitioner undertaking work that went against their own advice or resulted in unsuccessful organisational outcomes they felt could have been avoided had their advice been listened to and valued. The workplace factors contributing to burnout overlap in complex ways and the study supports the idea that burnout is a product of situational contexts, despite being acutely felt at the individual level.