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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between narrative disclosures and corporate performance based on Australian evidence. In particular it builds a model which discriminates between good and poor performing companies based on their corporate narratives.

A sample of Australian manufacturing companies is classified into two groups based on earnings per share (EPS) movement between 2008 and 2009. A content analysis of their discretionary narrative disclosures is used to classify and predict group membership.

This study finds that the word‐based variables based on discretionary disclosures are significantly correlated with corporate performance. Word‐based variables can successfully classify companies between “good” performers and “poor” performers with an accuracy of 86 percent.

The relatively small sample size, for Australian manufacturing companies, limits both the predictive ability of the model and its generalisability elsewhere.

The findings of the paper demonstrate that certain keywords, notably the use of “high/highest” and “dividends” are significantly and positively associated with superior performance.

The study builds a classification model for continuing Australian companies, whereas prior research focuses on UK and US companies and is based on a healthy/failed distinction.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which “corporate governance” and “conservatism” variables can contribute to the predictive ability of corporate financial disclosures.

Multiple discriminant analysis is used to differentiate between good and poor companies in Australian manufacturing industry on the basis of their 2009 performance. A classification model including size, governance and conservatism variables, together with financial ratio data is constructed based on 2008 data, and used to predict 2009 performance.

A model with conservatism, total debt/total assets, company size, and “percentage of shareholdings held by non‐executive directors” (representing corporate governance) as its independent variables, has a classification accuracy of 80.6 percent, and a predictive accuracy of 62.2 percent.

The relatively small sample size, for Australian manufacturing companies, limits both the predictive ability of the model and its generalisability elsewhere.

The findings of the paper demonstrate the importance of both “conservatism” and “corporate governance” measures in determining corporate financial performance.

The paper uses familiar discriminant methods in an unfamiliar context – focusing on surviving companies exhibiting extremes of financial performance.

The purpose of this paper is to theoretically and empirically analyze the impact of the types of micro-innovation on innovation performance and the choice of micro-innovation strategies in different contexts on the basis of an examination of the basis and standards of micro-innovation categorization.

The authors collected and analyzed 206 survey samples from the Zhejiang Province in China; there were 68, 63 and 75 enterprises at inception, high growth and maturity stages, respectively, and there were, in total, 53, 90 and 63 low-tech manufacturing small and medium enterprises (SMEs), technology-intensive manufacturing SMEs and service-oriented SMEs, respectively. Multiple regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses.

The analysis results suggest that SMEs at the embryonic stage should choose strategies of imitative innovation, whereas SMEs at growth stage should use continued micro-innovation and independent micro-innovation as the optimal choices; it is better for the SMEs at the mature stage to resort to independent micro-innovation. Low-tech manufacturing SMEs should opt for the continued micro-innovation strategy, and technology-intensive manufacturing SMEs should adopt independent micro-innovation, whereas service-oriented SMEs should choose both continued and independent micro-innovation strategies.

This study sets up a classification framework of micro-innovation and addresses its category and sources, thus extending the micro-innovation research results. The conclusion also supports and enriches the view of open innovation in the innovation theory. Hidden behind the phenomenon that internal and external factors play vital roles, it is a basic rule that innovation activities must be subject to various related factors.

Through three case studies, the authors aim to examine how Confucian humanistic philosophy can be applied to leadership practices and show how it is possible to practice humanistic leadership in the Chinese context.

The authors use case studies of three exemplary humanistic leaders and the companies they lead to describe their leadership practices and influence on others and their companies.

The authors identify three common elements that connect their observations to an emerging scholarly conceptualization of humanistic leadership and develop a framework of Confucian humanistic leadership consisting of five attributes. The cases the authors studied suggest that the five attributes should be understood as being mutually reinforcing and acting in concert, rather than each acting independently of the others. The authors found that there is inherent consistency and connection between the core values of Confucianism and humanistic leadership.

The research contributes to the leadership literature, specifically the emerging literature on humanistic leadership, by introducing a framework for Confucian humanistic leadership. While much of the extant literature on humanistic leadership has been conceptual, the study shows how it is possible to practice humanistic leadership in the Chinese context by drawing on the foundation provided by Confucian humanistic philosophy. The findings also contribute to humanistic leadership research by providing important insights into specific capabilities that can help put the principles of humanistic leadership into practice, but that have not been considered to date.

The purpose of this paper is to establish how small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in water, beverage, soap, detergent, metal fabrication, wood and furniture manufacturing industries can sustain or improve their competitive advantage by integrating specific resources and capabilities. The paper seeks to offer an alternative framework “resource capability-based view (RCBV)” that provides a strategic marketing direction for SMEs regarding how innovative marketing practices and dynamic marketing capabilities integrate to create sustainable market advantage.

This current paper employed a quantitative survey design with a positivist methodological research paradigm. The paper used a multi-stage stratified and simple random sampling technique to collect data from 591 manufacturing SMEs in Ghana. SMEs in water, beverage, soap, detergent, metal fabrication, wood and furniture manufacturing industries were sampled for the study. A structural equation model was employed to test the study hypotheses to arrive at the findings.

The study found that product design and packaging innovations, promotion innovations, retail innovations and pricing innovations provide sustainable market advantage for water, beverage, detergent and metal fabrication SMEs. The paper also found that new product designs and packages are the major drivers of sustainable market advantage followed by innovative retail outlets. The paper further originated that integrating marketing competence (marketing resources and marketing capabilities) and innovative marketing activities provides a marginal improvement in competitive advantage. Physical resources may result in market advantage but integrating physical resources with dynamic marketing capabilities provides sufficient competitive sustainability in a competitive market.

SMEs in water, beverage, soap, detergent, metal fabrication, wood and furniture manufacturing industries should prioritise their key marketing resources and capabilities in product designs, promotion, pricing and retailing innovations in order to sustain market advantage. Old products should not be faded from the market but rather SME managers should employ innovative retail strategies, such as eco-friendly advertising, product re-branding and digital platforms (social network sites and websites), which are important to sustaining market performance. Government must develop targeted policies to bridge the information gap between SMEs and research institutions such as universities through regular subsidised entrepreneurial training and creation of semi-annual industry-academic fairs. The main theoretical contribution of this current paper is the development of “RCBV” as a framework which shows how SMEs can integrate specific resources and capabilities to achieve sustainable market advantage. This framework offers an integrative view of conventional resource-based view and dynamic capability theory (DCT) which are independently examined in the literature.

This current study has proposed an integrated and elaborative approach to the conventional resource-based view and DCT which does not provide a composite understanding in the literature. SMEs may lack the needed resources and capabilities to introduce new products or extant product lines but this paper has demonstrated that how SME can sustain market advantage of existing product(s) by synchronously using specific marketing resources and capabilities. The proposed framework offers a guide for SMEs to integrate their physical resources and capabilities to sustain their market advantage.

Online news websites provide diverse article topics, such as fashion news, entertainment and movie information, to attract more users and create more benefits. Recommending movie information to users reading news online can enhance the impression of diverse information and may consequently improve benefits. Accordingly, providing online movie recommendations can improve users’ satisfactions with the website, and thus is an important trend for online news websites. This study aims to propose a novel online recommendation method for recommending movie information to users when they are browsing news articles.

Association rule mining is applied to users’ news and movie browsing to find latent associations between news and movies. A novel online recommendation approach is proposed based on latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), enhanced collaborative topic modeling (ECTM) and the diversity of recommendations. The performance of proposed approach is evaluated via an online evaluation on a real news website.

The online evaluation results show that the click-through rate can be improved by the proposed hybrid method integrating recommendation diversity, LDA, ECTM and users’ online interests, which are adapted to the current browsing news. The experiment results also show that considering recommendation diversity can achieve better performance.

Existing studies had not investigated the problem of recommending movie information to users while they are reading news online. To address this problem, a novel hybrid recommendation method is proposed for dealing with cross-type recommendation tasks and the cold-start issue. Moreover, the proposed method is implemented and evaluated online in a real world news website, while such online evaluation is rarely conducted in related research. This work contributes to deriving user’s online preferences for cross-type recommendations by integrating recommendation diversity, LDA, ECTM and adaptive online interests. The research findings also contribute to increasing the commercial value of the online news websites.

Due to the rapidly increasing volume of users and products in virtual worlds, recommender systems are an important feature in virtual worlds; they can help solve information overload problems. Virtual world users are able to perform several actions that promote the enjoyment of their virtual life, including interacting with others, visiting virtual houses and shopping for virtual products. This study aims to concentrate on the following two important factors: the social neighbors’ influences and the virtual house bandwagon phenomenon, which affects users’ preferences during their virtual house visits and purchasing processes.

The authors determine social influence by considering the interactions between the target user and social circle neighbors. The degree of influence of the virtual house bandwagon effect is derived by analyzing the preferences of the virtual house hosts who have been visited by target users during their successive visits. A novel hybrid recommendation method is proposed herein to predict users’ preferences by combining the analyses of both factors.

The recommendation performance of the proposed method is evaluated by conducting experiments with a data set collected from a virtual world platform. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the conventional recommendation methods, and they also exhibit the effectiveness of considering both the social influence and the virtual house bandwagon effect for making effective recommendations.

Existing studies on recommendation methods did not investigate the virtual house bandwagon effects that are unique to the virtual worlds. The novel idea of the virtual house bandwagon effect is proposed and analyzed for predicting users’ preferences. Moreover, a novel hybrid recommendation approach is proposed herein for generating virtual product recommendations. The proposed approach is able to improve the accuracy of preference predictions and enhance the innovative value of recommender systems for virtual worlds.

Netizens refer to citizens of the internet, and code-switching refers to the use of more than one language, style or form of expression to communicate. This study explores the advertising communication effectiveness of using netizen language code-switching in Facebook ads. Moreover, if a brand is with negative brand images, using positive brand images as a control group, this study investigates not only the advertising communication effectiveness of netizen language code-switching but also its effectiveness of remedying the negative brand images.

Online experiments were conducted, and data were analyzed using independent sample t-test, MANOVA and ANOVA.

The results indicate that netizen language code-switching can enhance advertising communication effectiveness in Facebook ads. Furthermore, under a negative brand image, netizen language code-switching has significant effects on improving Facebook advertising communication effectiveness.

This study takes netizens as the research subjects to explore the advertising communication effectiveness of netizen language code-switching in Facebook ads. This study provides further insight into the effect of netizens' culture on Facebook advertising and enriches the existing literature on social media advertising, as well as expanding the application of code-switching. The results of this study provide enterprises a new perspective on the copywriting content design of Facebook ads.

Urban green spaces support people to approach active, healthy ageing, especially in high-density cities where they compensate for limited private living spaces. This research paper aims to examine how urban green spaces support active, healthy ageing by exploring correlations between behaviour, physical setting and gender difference among older people in a highly populated urban context.

Urban parks in older neighbourhoods of Macau were selected for data collection. Photographic documentation was used to collect data, with 1,201 older people photographed identified as valid samples. Each was coded according to labels of behaviour, physical setting and gender. Chi-squared tests were conducted to assess correlations between behaviours and features of physical settings, and differences between genders in behaviours and physical settings. Logistic regression analysis was conducted to further examine associations between older people's behaviours and features of physical settings by gender.

The research reveals types and frequency of behaviours displayed, preferred environmental features for different behaviours and gender differences in behaviours and preferred environmental features. Design principles targeting active, healthy ageing should consider particular amenities and street furniture, the arrangement of trees and landscapes and the integration of open and secluded places.

Previous studies address older people's behaviour from the perspective of either environmental influence or gender difference, but there have been few studies on gendered behavioural differences among older people in urban green spaces. Analysing the behaviour–physical setting–gender relationship provides more evidence in the field of built environment studies.

This paper aims to solve the problem between detection efficiency and performance in grasp commodities rapidly. A fast detection and grasping method based on improved faster R-CNN is purposed and applied to the mobile manipulator to grab commodities on the shelf.

To reduce the time cost of algorithm, a new structure of neural network based on faster R CNN is designed. To select the anchor box reasonably according to the data set, the data set-adaptive algorithm for choosing anchor box is presented; multiple models of ten types of daily objects are trained for the validation of the improved faster R-CNN. The proposed algorithm is deployed to the self-developed mobile manipulator, and three experiments are designed to evaluate the proposed method.

The result indicates that the proposed method is successfully performed on the mobile manipulator; it not only accomplishes the detection effectively but also grasps the objects on the shelf successfully.

The proposed method can improve the efficiency of faster R-CNN, maintain excellent performance, meet the requirement of real-time detection, and the self-developed mobile manipulator can accomplish the task of grasping objects.