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Corona Virus Disease (Covid-19) is a global pandemic that emerged at the end of 2019 and caused disruptions in global supply chains, particularly in the food supply chains that exposed the vulnerability of today’s food supply chain in a major disruption which provided a unique research opportunity. This review explores the current research direction for food supply chain resilience and identifies gaps for future research in preparing for future major global pandemics.

This article presents a review of food supply chain resilience followed a systematic literature review of the business and management-based studies related to the food supply chain in Covid-19 published between December 2019 and December 2021 to identify the immediate issues and responses that need to be addressed in the event of future disruptions in food supply chains due to new global health threats.

The study revealed the need for more literature on food supply chain resilience, particularly resilience to a major global pandemic. The study also uncovered the sequence of events in a major pandemic and identified some strategies for building resilience to potential future risks of such an event.

The limitations of this study are apparent. Firstly, the selection of databases is not comprehensive. Due to time limitations, authoritative publishers such as Springer, Emerald, Wiley and Taylor & Francis were not selected. Secondly, a single author completed the literature quality testing and text analysis, possibly reducing the credibility of the results due to subjective bias. Thirdly, the selected literature are the studies published during the immediate event of Covid-19, and before January 2022, other research studies may have been completed but were still in the state of auditing at this time.

This paper is the first study that provides a detailed classification of the immediate challenges to the food supply chain faced in both upstream and downstream nodes during a major global disruption. For researchers, this clearly shows the immediate difficulties faced at each node of the food supply chain, which provides research topics for future studies.

Collective bargaining (CB) in China is perceived as inadequate, thanks to the lack of trade union independence and representation. However, CB of the sweater industry in Wenling, one of the world’s largest manufacturing centre, shows another tendency. Using Wenling as the case, the purpose of this paper is to explore whether a new form of CB is emerging in China.

This paper uses a qualitative case study approach, and covers stakeholders, including the government, trade union, sweater association, workers and employers.

In China, trade unions are constrained by corporatism and therefore cannot become the effective agents of CB. However, the increased industrial conflicts could in effect push employers to become the engine of change. This paper finds that employers endeavour to use CB as a tool to stabilise employment relations and neutralise workers resistance. Consequently, a gradual transition in labour relations system is on the way, characterised by “disorderly resistance” to “orderly compliance” in the working class.

The case industry may not be sufficient in drawing the details of CB in China, while it provides the trend of change.

Conventional wisdom on the Chinese labour relations and CB tends to ignore the employer’s perspective. This paper partially fills in the gap by offering CB and change of employment relations from the aspect of employers.

Scientific knowledge is usually regarded as the basis for the management of natural environment and wildlife in ecotourism. However, recently, social construction approaches challenge the domination of natural science. This study aims to examine the effectiveness of the social construction paradigm in ecotourism management, through conducting a content analysis of social media comments on an accident caused by a monkey in a Chinese ecotourism area. The results show that people commented on the accident from five aspects. First, the public expressed their compassion and mourning for the deceased. Second, people thought that the death was casual and absurd, yet life is full of uncertainty and people should cherish the present. Third, people commented much on the deceased tourist’s company, which is a famous sugar brand well entrenched in many Chinese people’s childhood memories. Fourth, people constructed the monkey as Monkey King, Golden Monkey (another famous sugar brand in China) and as a criminal. Fifth, people also gave their opinions about possible causes of the accident, namely, it was caused by “the mandate of heaven,” company competition, conspiracies or poor management. This study only seriously considers the comments about the mandate of heaven. This explanation is consistent with the Chinese traditional construction of nature as “heaven,” which is believed to dominate the natural and human worlds. Most people, including the managers, accepted the accident and did not explore further about the reasons for the accident. In this case, such a social construction of nature does not aid effective ecotourism management.

This study aims to examine an important mechanism in the policy-led institutional transitions in China, namely, Te Shi Te Ban (Special Treatments for Special Matters) – an institutional device that facilitates policy implementation. The discussions are contextualized based on the latest chapter of China’s institutional transition, known as the reform initiative of Fang Guan Fu (i.e. the FGF reform: delegate power, streamline administration and optimize government services), which is a policy regime introduced in 2018 to improve the state-market relationship for better socioeconomic development.

Based on the theoretical lens of proto-institutions and institutional work and using real-life examples from mass media, this perspective paper examines the effects of the Special Treatments in the institutional transition under the FGF Reform.

The Special Treatments are the proto-institutions purposively adopted by the regulators in China to innovate, supervise and renovate the rules and norms during policy implementation. They produce both incremental and radical institutional effects which allow for a more efficient and effective policy-led institutional transition.

This study contributes to institutional theory in the Chinese management context. Foremost, this study introduces the concept of proto-institutional work and shows how proto-institutions can serve as a mechanism to support and manage the process of institutional transition. In addition, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to study the FGF Reform – the latest reform initiative in China and theorize an under-researched but important mechanism in its institutional environment – the Special Treatments for Special Matters.

Although the Daodejing is a text that is more than 2,400 years old, its concepts regarding leadership nevertheless fit well into current discussions on sustainability and responsibility. This paper aims to explore these concepts.

The paper focuses on the strategic aspects that can be found in the Daodejing's approach to leadership.

The Daodejing offers interesting perspectives on the relationship between personal development and sustainability. Because of their topicality these concepts are moreover particularly interesting within the context of corporate culture and glocalization for multinational companies operating in China.

The paper explores aspects of the philosophy of the Daodejing that often get neglected, but which offer interesting perspectives on current issues in management.

The purpose of this paper is to solve new pricing issues faced by low-carbon companies in the Yellow River Basin, which is caused by the change of key pricing factors in the mixed appliance background of Big Data and blockchain, such as product quality and carbon-emission reduction CER level (hereafter, CER level).

We choose a low-carbon supply chain with a low-carbon manufacturer and a retailer as our research object. Then, we propose that using the ineffective effect of the CER level and the quality and safety level to reflect the relationships among the CER level, the quality and safety level and the market demand is more suitable in the new environment. Based on these, we revise the demand equation. Afterwards, by using Stackelberg game, four cost-sharing situations and their pricing rules are analyzed.

Results indicated that in the four cost-sharing situations, the change trends and the magnitudes of the best retail prices were not affected by the changes of the inputs of the demand information and the traceability services costs (hereafter, DITS costs), the proportion about retailer's DITS costs undertaken by the manufacturer, the ineffective effect coefficient of the CER level and the quality and safety level and the cost optimization coefficient. However, the cost-sharing situations could affect the change magnitudes of the best revenues.

This paper has two main contributions. First, this paper proposes a demand function that is more suitable for the mixed appliance background of Big Data and blockchain. Secondly, this paper improves the cost-sharing model and finds that demand information sharing and traceability service sharing have different impacts on key pricing factors of low-carbon product. In addition, this research provides a theoretical reference for low-carbon supply chain members to formulate pricing strategies in the new background.

This paper aims to explore various tensions related to the diffusion and reception of the New Qing History (NQH) in China, and more specifically, it aims at underlying a recurrent tension within the core of this debate, between a Global and a Nationalist historical narrative.

The author’s focus is to analyze various texts published in China between 2006 and 2018.

The author argues that the intensity of the current debate is partly related on the one hand, to the fact that NQH undermines various aspects of China’s Nationalist teleology and territorial claims and, on the other hand, to the basic difficulty of accepting the coexistence of various historical representations that are risking to weaken contemporary’s justifications of its rising schemes.

The text presents an original reading of some important issues raised by the NQH debate.

This paper aims to explore the relationship between ethical self-fashioning and citizenship practices in the ongoing revival of “Chinese Traditional Culture” pursued in tandem by the party-state and by private actors in present-day China.

Adopting an anthropological approach, the author draws from three sets of resources: (1) research literature on China’s political history and key texts of early Chinese thought, (2) contemporary state discourses on citizen formation, and (3) participant observation notes and interviews with organizers and followers of the Wu-Wei School (a pseudonym). The author conducts a textual analysis of primary and secondary literature and a critical discourse analysis of the ethnographic data and examines emerging themes.

Firstly, the author identifies a crucial dimension in the historical and cultural roots of Chinese citizenship practices: an enduring conception that binds individual ethical self-improvement with socio-political flourishing. Secondly, examining contemporary state discourses on “citizen quality” and “reviving China’s outstanding traditional culture”, the author showcases how party-state authorities call on individuals to self-reform for national rejuvenation. Thirdly, the author investigates how members of the Wu-Wei School construe their individual pursuits of ethical self-improvement as significant for societal progress.

Based on these findings, the author demonstrates the ways in which autochthonous conceptions of Chinese citizenship give a central place to private acts of self-fashioning. The author argues that the entanglement between individual ethics and citizenship practices constitutes a crucial but largely understudied dimension of Chinese citizenship.

Blockchain technology can overcome many complicated problems related to confidentiality, integrity and availability of fast and secure distributed systems in the agri-food supply chain. In emerging economies like India, blockchain application in the agri-food supply chain is still new, and their adoption is underdeveloped. This paper aims to investigate the drivers of blockchain technology adoption and their effect on the behavioral intention of stakeholders in adopting blockchain technology among various stakeholders in the agri-food supply chain. The study also develops a framework to enhance understanding of blockchain adoption in the agri-food supply chain as well as the stakeholders' motivation in seeking blockchain solutions.

Considering the most significant aspects of blockchain adoption in the agri-food supply chain, this study attempts to develop an adoption model by using the extended unified theory of acceptance and technology model with interfirm trust and transparency as additional factors. Data was collected from a sample of 200 stakeholders in the North Indian state of Punjab. The empirical analysis was carried out using structural equation modeling in Smart PLS3.

The findings supported the developed framework and the results of SEM indicate that all the paths are supported. In particular, the findings of the study reveal that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, interfirm trust and transparency are the drivers of blockchain adoption and have a significant impact on the behavioral intention of stakeholders. Cumulatively, the results positively impact the performance of agri-food supply chain. From this study, it is found that the adoption of blockchain technology in agri-food supply chain enhances their performance.

The originality of the study lies in the developed framework, technology adoption will help them focus in the right direction by eliminating manual methods and converting the agri-food supply chain into a digitalization system.

A key challenge found in additive manufacturing is the difficulty to produce components with replicable microstructure and mechanical performance in distinct orientations. This study aims to investigate the influence of build orientation on the fracture toughness of additively manufactured AlSi10Mg specimens.

The AlSi10Mg specimens were manufactured using the selective laser melting (SLM) technology. The fracture toughness was experimentally determined (under ASTM E399-09) using C(T) specimens manufactured in different orientations. The microstructure of the specimens was examined using metallography to determine the effects of grain orientation on fracture toughness.

The fracture toughness magnitude of manufactured specimens ranged between 36 and 50 MPam, which closely matched conventional bulk material and literature values regarding AlSi10Mg components. The C(T) specimens printed in the T-L orientation yielded the highest fracture toughness. The grain orientation and fracture toughness values confirm the anisotropic nature of SLM parts where the T-L-oriented specimen obtained the highest K_IC value. A clear interaction between the melt pool boundaries and micro-slipping during the loading application was observed.

The novelty of this paper consists in elucidating the relationship between grain orientation and fracture toughness of additively manufactured AlSi10Mg specimens because of the anisotropy generated by the different melting pool boundaries and orientations in SLM. The findings show that melt pool boundaries can behave as easier pathways for cracks to propagate and subsequently reduce the fracture toughness of specimens with cracks perpendicular to the build direction.