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This chapter aims to answer whether foreign multinational corporations (MNCs) operating within the Chinese context differ from indigenous firms on several essential labor standards indicators: white- and blue-collar salaries, pension insurance, and working hours. In drawing upon neo-institutional and organizational imprinting theories and applying these to the Chinese context, the study addresses competing arguments regarding the expected effects of ownership type on these indicators. We employ seemingly unrelated regressions (SURs) to empirically examine a novel national survey of 1,268 firms in 12 Chinese cities. The regression results show that foreign MNCs do not provide uniquely beneficial labor practice packages to workers when compared with various indigenous firm types, including state-owned enterprises (SOEs), affiliate businesses of Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, and domestic private enterprises (DPEs). Specifically, although MNCs provide relatively higher wage rates, they underperform relative to SOEs concerning social insurance. However, DPEs consistently underperform relative to MNCs across most indicators. The mixture of the results contributes important nuances to the application of neo-institutional and organizational imprinting theories to the Chinese context.

Purpose — The chapter presents the practical applications of web search statistics analysis. The process description highlights the potential use of search queries and statistical data and how they could be used in various forecasting situations. The presented case is an example of applied computational intelligence and the main focus is oriented towards the decision support offered by the software mechanism and its capabilities to automatically gather, process and analyse data.

Methodology/approach — The statistics of the search queries as a source of prognostic information are analysed in a step-by-step process, starting from their content and scope, their processing and applications, and concluding with usage in a software-based intelligent framework.

Research implications — The analysis of search engine trends offers a great opportunity for many areas of research. Into the future, deploying this information in the prognosis will further develop intelligent data processing.

Practical implications — This functionality offers a unique possibility, impossible until now, to observe, estimate and predict various processes using wide, precise and accurate behaviour observations. The scope and quality of data allow practitioners to successfully use it in various prognostic problems (i.e. political, medical, or economic).

Originality/value of paper — The chapter presents practical implications of technology. The chapter then highlights potential areas that would benefit from the analysis of queries statistics. Moreover, it introduces ‘WebPerceiver’, an intelligent platform, built to make the analysis and usage of search trends easier and more generally available to a wide audience, including non-skilled users.

Special education in China has lagged behind regular education for many years, however, the past few decades, the government has made considerable efforts to develop and improve the special education system. While the citizens of China have had a generic moral interest in disability since ancient times, the development of special education schools did not occur until American and European missionaries started schools for the visually and hearing impaired in the 19th century. The next major influence in the development of the special education system occurred with China’s Cultural Revolution in 1978. Interestingly, there is not any exclusive legislation on special education but in the 1980s, the government started Learning in Regular Classrooms (LRC), which is China’s version of inclusion. LRC has progressed rapidly the past two decades; however, the quality of instruction is low due to a lack of specialists, a shortage of personnel, inadequate funding, and limited technology as well as other barriers that are delineated in the chapter. The chapter emphasizes the government’s recent efforts in in-service teacher training, the preparation of preservice teachers, working with families, developing community rehabilitation training programs, and implementing evidence-based practices. Special education in China today is at a good place but it has quite a way from the ideal situation.

This study scrutinised Shanghai junior high school teachers’ emotions and emotion management strategies in relation to teachers’ work settings and content. A mixed-methods approach was applied to collect data via field observations, interviews, and a quantitative survey. The aim of this study was two-fold. Firstly, it aimed to identify the typical work settings in which teachers experienced work-related emotions. Secondly, it aimed to reveal teachers’ priority work in school and how it affected teachers’ choices of emotion management strategies.

The data were analysed through the lens of emotional labour theories and professional agency theories. Findings showed that classroom teaching and the professional learning community activities were two typical settings in which the teachers experienced the most intensive emotions. Most Shanghai teachers managed their momentary emotions by either genuinely expressing their emotions that matched their roles and the scenario, or by purposely suppressing emotions to meet social and organisational expectations. Furthermore, most teachers adopted the long-term mood regulation strategy by aligning their emotions with long-term goal achievement in the future. As professional agents, the Shanghai teachers did not only manage their own emotions at work using these two strategies, but also managed students’ emotions as part of the moral education.

This chapter explores a descriptive theory of multidimensional travel behaviour, estimation of quantitative models and demonstration in an agent-based microsimulation.

A descriptive theory on multidimensional travel behaviour is conceptualised. It theorizes multidimensional knowledge updating, search start/stopping criteria and search/decision heuristics. These components are formulated or empirically modelled and integrated in a unified and coherent approach.

The theory is supported by empirical observations and the derived quantitative models are tested by an agent-based simulation on a demonstration network.

Based on artificially intelligent agents, learning and search theory and bounded rationality, this chapter makes an effort to embed a sound theoretical foundation for the computational process approach and agent-based micro-simulations. A pertinent new theory is proposed with experimental observations and estimations to demonstrate agents with systematic deviations from the rationality paradigm. Procedural and multidimensional decision-making are modelled. The numerical experiment highlights the capabilities of the proposed theory in estimating rich behavioural dynamics.

The goal of this chapter is to respond to the theoretical inquiries by scholars who are interested in how the public–private partnership (PPP) models adapt to China’s context where political power dictates economic strategies. We also want to provide suggestions to policy designers who aim to promote a sustainable investment environment for domestic and international investors. We review the literature that explains the upside and downside of PPP projects in contemporary China. (1) We classify the trajectory of PPP evolution into four phases, i.e., emergence, growth, recession and revival. (2) We note that private companies take a disadvantageous position in the partnership compared with governments and state-owned enterprises because of a lack of specialized legislation, unequal competition between private companies and state-owned enterprises and the opposition from the civic society. (3) We identify political risks as the most influential risks. Political risks also lead to the misallocation of other risks between public and private parties that contributes to the high failure rate of China’s PPP projects. Based on these findings, we recommend governments to draft specialized legislation, stabilize the political environment and provide favourable subsidies to local governments to limit the risks involved in PPP projects. We also advise private enterprises and state-owned enterprises to focus on negotiating over task and risk division with governments when they make decisions to participate in PPP projects. This full review of studies on PPP development in China provides reliable recommendations to scholars, governments and enterprises.

Within both Western and Eastern traditions of virtue ethics, there is a Doctrine of the Mean, suggesting that errors may lie either in excess or in deficiency. The need to avoid both excess and deficiency in the allocation of finite resources is a concern in many sorts of business decisions, some with ethical implications. One finite resource is the resource of attention, and ethical problems can arise from failures to attend to important things. Both Aristotle and classical Confucianism accept the importance of paying attention to circumstances rather than following fixed rules or blindly maximising value. For organisations to give appropriate attention to different things requires suitable intra-organisational reporting and communication. Then there is still need for awareness that resources are finite, and for activity that is sustainable, highlighting the related idea of harmony, especially salient in the Confucian tradition.

Friendships, an important form of people’s everyday relationships with others, have been studied by many scholars from different disciplines. However, there is limited research on friendship in the context of childhood, particularly that of Chinese rural children. This chapter presents findings from an in-depth study on Chinese children’s understandings and experiences of friendships with peers in the context of a rural primary boarding school. Data for this research were collected through an intensive five-month study, using an ethnographic approach, in a rural primary boarding school (given the pseudonym ‘Central Primary School’) in the western area of China in 2016. This chapter discusses parents’ influences on children’s selection of friends, particularly their ‘good’ friends, and their understandings of the functions of making friends in the context of rural China. It unpacks parents’ interventions on children’s friendships by discussing the moralised hierarchical relationship between children and their parents – children are expected to show obedience to parents. Then, it argues that the Confucian-collectivist values construct a relationship between a child’s individual achievement and their family’s collective good, which makes friendship not only an individual issue but also a collective one too.

Cross-docking is a supply chain distribution and logistics strategy for which less-than-truckload shipments are consolidated into full-truckload shipments. Goods are stored up to a maximum of 24 hours in a cross-docking terminal. In this chapter, we build on the literature review by Ladier and Alpan (2016), who reviewed cross-docking research and conducted interviews with cross-docking managers to find research gaps and provide recommendations for future research. We conduct a systematic literature review, following the framework by Ladier and Alpan (2016), on cross-docking literature from 2015 up to 2020. We focus on papers that consider the intersection of research and industry, e.g., case studies or studies presenting real-world data. We investigate whether the research has changed according to the recommendations of Ladier and Alpan (2016). Additionally, we examine the adoption of Industry 4.0 practices in cross-docking research, e.g., related to features of the physical internet, the Internet of Things and cyber-physical systems in cross-docking methodologies or case studies. We conclude that only small adaptations have been done based on the recommendations of Ladier and Alpan (2016), but we see growing attention for Industry 4.0 concepts in cross-docking, especially for physical internet hubs.

At the doorsteps of the fourth wave of the industrial revolution, it is compulsory to develop a new understanding regarding the future of human labor based on “Industry 4.0” for German manufacturers, and two American concepts: “The Industrial Internet” and “The Internet of Things.” How will the nature of human work be in the digital economy of the forthcoming future? The problem of unemployment and the composition of the labor market, in terms of professional skills, are yet to be waiting for answers. Scientific management is also transforming to answer the emerging requirements of this new era, as “Digital Taylorism” to re-organize work in a techno-centric manner. Accordingly, the aim of this chapter is to examine the nature and the possible opportunities and threats of the digital age and try to develop a digital Taylorism understanding to minimize the negative impacts of digitalism on both individual workers and society in a way that all parts including the manufacturers can fully take the benefit of potential advantages of this new era.