Search results

The chapter is aimed at comprehensive discovery of the basic legal tools to improve the quality of corporate governance from the standpoint of efficient revealing, preventing and shooting negative implications of internal corporate disputes. The subject of the study, in particular, is regulatory and non-regulatory enactments in this area. Within the study we employ basic approaches that allow to reveal the conditions ensuring efficient corporate governance, i.e., dialectical, historical, systemic, formal-logic, and comparative-law ones. Therewith, the main focus is on the application of system theory developments in terms of the methodological techniques to describe any system object.

Regarding the disputes between participants of the corporation, we substantiate the need of creating conditions for the highest account of opinions of all the participants in the development of collective will, as well as for restraint of major participants from potential abuses (through accumulative voting mechanism, implementing “two keys” principle, etc.). Special attention is paid to the issues of procedure and content of interest-collision transactions made by economic societies.

The authors point out definite guidelines to improve legislation in anti-conflict aspect (forms of holding general meetings of participants, exclusive and non-exclusive competence of governing bodies, the content of acts coordinating interested-party transactions, etc.).

The paper aims to discuss the amended provisions relating to protection of minority shareholders (PMS) in the newly amended Chinese Company Law and evaluate whether it adequately protects the interests of minority shareholders.

In total, 26 cases will be examined by discussing the characteristics of the relevant parties involved, specifically plaintiffs, defendants, their lawyers, judges and also the grounds of complaint. A comparison will be made between the cases decided by following the first Company Law (1994) and the cases decided in accordance with the newly amended Company Law (2006).

The findings indicate that the amended Company Law has removed certain drawbacks in PMS present in the first Company Law (1994) but the New Company Law can protect interests of minority shareholders only to a certain extent. Further amendments are still needed.

This is one of the first studies to actually examine the implementation of PMS‐related provisions in the newly amended Company Law.

This study aims to predict popular contributors through text representations of user-generated content in open crowds.

Three text representation approaches – count vector, Tf-Idf vector, word embedding and supervised machine learning techniques – are used to generate popular contributor predictions.

The results of the experiments demonstrate that popular contributor predictions are considered successful. The F1 scores are all higher than the baseline model. Popular contributors in open crowds can be predicted through user-generated content.

This research presents brand new empirical evidence drawn from text representations of user-generated content that reveals why some contributors' ideas are more viral than others in open crowds.

This research suggests that companies can learn from popular contributors in ways that help them improve customer agility and better satisfy customers' needs. In addition to boosting customer engagement and triggering discussion, popular contributors' ideas provide insights into the latest trends and customer preferences. The results of this study will benefit marketing strategy, new product development, customer agility and management of information systems.

The paper provides new empirical evidence for popular contributor prediction in an innovation crowd through text representation approaches.

This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of the effects of active political engagement in port-of-entry jobs and employment pathways for graduate students in a post-communist context which is characterized by clientelism. The data are derived from a structured survey of a small local labour market where political clientelism is pronounced due to the strong network ties. Controlling for both demand and supply factors, the authors identify a profile for those who are more prone to engage politically in exchange for public sector jobs, which are in turn vulnerable to regime changes.

The authors use data from a sample of 191 students that records month-to-month employment states for three consecutive years (2012–2014). The method attempts to replicate an experimental design with repeated measures before and after the June 2013 government elections. The data is analysed using sequence analysis with optimal matching and difference-in-difference methods.

The analysis provides evidence of links between political engagement and selection onto different employment pathways under conditions of political clientelism. The pathways themselves are also shown to be differentially impacted by the 2013 election (positively or negatively). Together, these results are supportive of claims that jobs in Albania, particularly those in the public sector, are linked to the short-term presence of vote-buying. This is shown to be the case even for this sample of educated members of the labour force (i.e. university graduates). The analysis also finds evidence of accumulative disadvantages over time, in relation to subjective perceptions of life satisfaction, migration intentions, employability and success in life, as a result of active political engagement.

The study uses a unique data set and a novel methodological approach, sequence analysis. Occupational history calendars were used to capture quantitative information recording detailed work histories. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this innovative method has not been used before to measure the temporal effects of political engagement on employment pathways.

The dynamic nature of uncertainty sources in regional operations represents supply chain management (SCM) imperatives to review uncertainty management frameworks on an ongoing basis with a view to identifying and prioritising critical indices of uncertainty for effective SCM. The purpose of this study is to identify the critical indices of uncertainty for regional supply chains and analyse how SCM practitioners perceive uncertainty.

This paper presents a Delphi-based study with a panel of 70 SCM experts from the Sultanate of Oman in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. It applies three rounds of a Delphi exercise to identify, select and prioritise the critical indices of supply chain uncertainty perceived by panel experts. The thematic analysis also provides theorisations on the process for uncertainty perception and factors shaping perception.

A total of 39 uncertainty indices were identified from demand, supply, manufacturing, control, technology, competitive, project, transport and geological sources. The Delphi selection round captured the top 12 indices of experts. The research found an accumulative–aggregative duality that explains uncertainty perception and a cost–conformance–connection triadic set of factors underlying the perceived critical indices. Project uncertainty produced the top-ranked index in the final Delphi round.

This paper makes three main contributions. First, it offers a bottom-up based insight into supply chain uncertainty using the Delphi-based study and from a GCC perspective. Second, the research is unique in its focus on Oman and, third, it is of value for the international operations of GCC companies and for international firms with intentions of expanding, moving or outsourcing their operations to a GCC country such as Oman.

This study aims to investigate how the timing behavior affects the capital structure decisions of South Asian family firms. A strand of literature is available based on the capital structure of firms in general but inconsistent with family businesses framework and not from market timing outlook. This study looks at the issues from the market timing perspectives of both equity and debt market timing.

The sample of the study is the listed family firms of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The firm-level data are collected from Thomson Reuters' DataStream and the ownership data collected from the countries' stock exchanges and financial statements of the family firms.

The results show that there is strong support for the market timing in the family firms' capital structure. Moreover, the financial crisis of 2007–2009 surprisingly had a positive effect on the capital structure of South Asian family business.

This study looks at the issues from the market timing perspectives of both equity and debt market timing. It provides evidence for supporting the equity and debt market timing effect on the capital structure and financing decision of family firms. It also addresses the impact of the 2007–2009 financial crisis on the capital structure of family firms.

The chapter covers the legal landscape and roadmap of legal aspects for venture capital (VC) investments and financing.

Mexico’s VC industry is composed by 63 Mexico-based fund managers plus another 50 foreign firms that have done at least one transaction on the past four years. In sum, they have committed over $1.64 billion USD to be invested in the venture space, distributed over a diverse pool of VC stages and industries. As many of 46 funds are focused on seed capital, leaving the rest for later stages.

Regarding deal activity, AMEXCAP has record of 782 VC transactions for a total of $834 million USD invested from 2010 to September 2017. The industry saw its best year in its history in 2016 with the largest number of transactions with 182, representing $209 million USD of capital invested. Of these, 55% of all deals were in the seed stage, 40% in series A and B, and 5% were in later stages.

The purpose of this paper is to perform a systematic review of articles that have used the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT).

The results produced in this research are based on the literature analysis of 174 existing articles on the UTAUT model. This has been performed by collecting data including demographic details, methodological details, limitations, and significance of relationships between the constructs from the available articles based on the UTAUT.

The findings indicated that general purpose systems and specialized business systems were examined in the majority of the articles using the UTAUT. The analysis also indicated that cross-sectional approach, survey methods, and structural equation modelling analysis techniques were the most explored research methodologies whereas SPSS was found to be the largely used analysis tools. Moreover, the weight analysis of independent variables indicates that variables such as performance expectancy and behavioural intention qualified for the best predictor category. Moreover, the analysis also suggested that single subject or biased sample as the most explored limitation across all studies.

The search activities were centered on occurrences of keywords to avoid tracing a large number of publications where these keywords might have been used as casual words in the main text. However, we acknowledge that there may be a number of studies, which lack keywords in the title, but still focus upon UTAUT in some form.

This is the first research of its type which has extensively examined the literature on the UTAUT and provided the researchers with the accumulative knowledge about the model.

This paper addresses the current lack of solar photovoltaic (PV) adoption by Australian apartment dwellers by proposing a conceptual model that identifies and integrates the factors influencing owners' attitudes towards PV adoption.

The conceptual model, which this paper terms the apartment-based solar adoption (ASA) model, is developed by applying motivation–opportunity–ability (MOA) theory to relevant findings in property development, green energy and strata governance literature.

The ASA model demonstrates the process by which an apartment-owning consumer may progress from considering solar PV adoption to recommending the action to their strata property's Owners' Committee (OC). It incorporates three motivational drivers (pragmatic considerations, perceived values and perceived social norms), three conditional mediators (location accessibility, resource availability and decision-making conditions) and three requirements from the consumer (actual and perceived knowledge, the ability to participate in decision-making and social connections and status).

This article contributes originality to research on two counts. Firstly, it provides a conceptual framework of specific relevance to issues concerning solar PV adoption, and secondly, it offers a systematic means for research into strata governance decision-making. Further research is required to develop the means with which to utilise the model prescriptively and measure longitudinal effects, such as ongoing trends in apartment owners' motivations. Further research is also recommended into how the ASA model may be utilised to identify generalisable consumer typologies among apartment owners.

The ASA model may assist building maintenance providers in developing and marketing solar PV services tailored to apartment residents' requirements and enhance strata managers' ability to inform and guide apartment owners. In turn, property developers would be able to review apartment-based solar projects, measure their increased value and decreased energy costs and incorporate this information when planning future developments.

The ASA model may provide a template for apartment owners and owners' corporations considering solar PV for their property. Public policymakers could also refer to the model to incentivise apartment-based solar PV adoption, whether through designing local information campaigns, developing financial incentives or mitigating identified regulatory barriers. By facilitating solar PV adoption in Australian apartment housing, the model may ensure sustainable post-carbon energy consumption for Australia's housing stock and act as an example for high-density housing development internationally.

The ASA model addresses the many drivers and barriers known to affect solar PV adoption by apartment owners, presenting a framework on which to arrange these factors and outline their causal relationships. This framework may inform strata properties' future solar PV adoption initiatives by incorporating their specific physical characteristics, stakeholder dynamics and institutional structure. It also consolidates and provides generalisability to the concepts established in current literature.