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Global businesses create and sustain operational success and create value by balancing the centripetal and centrifugal organizational forces they generate. Productive efforts to achieve strategic and operational success are enabled by the balance of competing tensions not their oscillations. Internal regulators contribute to this balance when they are understood and systematically integrated into both short and long-term decision-making. Inattention to the intricacies of interactive regulating dynamics and systems dilute value creation, or worse, destroy it. The whole business organization must be greater than the sum of its parts to deliver optimum value. Anything less creates gaps which competitors will exploit to the detriment of shareholder value creation. The business landscape is replete with companies that failed to create or sustain balance. There are also examples of great companies that nurture tensions to promote proper balance.

Multicultural teams (MCTs) and their managers are subject to numerous exogenous forces that profoundly affect how these teams’ members relate, what their difficulties are, and how they interact with task, technology and the larger organization(s) around them. We approach such teams from a multi-level perspective, focusing on global business culture, industry situation, and national political context as macro forces affecting these teams. We explain how these factors affect team functioning through the centripetal and centrifugal forces that they exert on individuals. Our perspective will acknowledge the complex reality of social construction among team members, and offer the view that members’ expectations and their mutual interactions are responsible for shaping each other's subsequent cognitions.

The purpose of this paper is to contrast the speech genres in the original and the published versions of an article written by academic researchers and published in the US practitioner-oriented journal, Strategic Finance. The original version, submitted by the researchers, was rewritten by a professional editor in the USA before it was published.

The paper analyses the “persuasive” speech genre of the original version and the “authoritative” speech genre of the published version.

Although it was initially thought that the differences between the two versions were due to differences in the forms communication used by academics and practitioners, as the analysis progressed it became clear that the differences the authors were observing could be traced to more profound differences in philosophical assumptions about the “way of understanding and constructing a world”.

The choice of language and argumentation should be given careful attention when the authors craft the accounting frameworks and research papers, and especially when the authors seek to communicate the findings of the research to practitioners. However, the authors have focused on just one instance in which a text written by academics was re-written for publication in a practitioner journal.

The paper contrasts the rationalism of the persuasive speech genre and the pragmatism of the authoritative speech genre. It cautions academic researchers against uncritically adopting specific speech genres, whether they are academic or practitioner speech genres, without carefully reflecting on their relevance and implications for understanding the nature of the phenomenon being discussed.

No previous research has considered the changing agglomeration effect of foreign direct investment (FDI). The purpose of this paper is to fill the gap in the literature.

The paper uses China as the object of study and examines the centripetal and centrifugal forces associated with FDI clustering over time.

Through studying the FDI determinants for the 29 Chinese provinces from 1993 to 2008, the empirical analysis supports a weakening agglomeration effect of FDI over time in China and further suggests that the effect has nearly vanished in the past few years.

Data availability restricts the analysis to using provincial aggregate data and so further research is called for. It would provide more accurate and insightful information to study the FDI agglomeration effects at a finer level, using more disaggregated city‐level data by sector and by source country.

As the Chinese government has been making efforts to direct FDI to inland areas, this research provides immediate policy implications. Policy‐makers' investment incentives to direct FDI could go to waste when the agglomeration effect of FDI is too strong. The incentives should be able to achieve a much larger effect when the agglomeration effect becomes less strong.

Looks at the process whereby certain members of corporate management teams are marginalized as a result of the central and powerful role of central departments such as finance and personnel. Investigates the impact on the effective working of the team and the consequences for the organization as a whole.

Workforce diversity is becoming a crucial matter in the area of internal communication. Realizing that there are multiple brackets within the body of a workforce (i.e. internal audience), the purpose of this paper is to develop an intermediate approach to manage diversity by segmenting the internal audience.

Developing a segmentation approach for managing diversity, the authors recommended the use of a few mathematical methodologies, including the expectation-maximization algorithm, partial least squares structural equation model (PLS-SEM) methodology, and Chow test, on a surveyed data set collected from 1,236 nurses of the US healthcare system. A PLS-SEM model, including employees’ mission awareness, management’s mission fulfillment, employees’ mission fulfillment, and turnover intention, was examined with respect to two internal segments.

Using a simple set of demographic variables, the authors demonstrated a practical approach to segmenting an internal audience and showed that causal relationships in a nomological network of variables regarding mission integration are significantly different between internal segments. Based on the segmentation approach, the authors proved that managers, in an effort to gain maximum diversity, can mix and match both the centrifugal force of diversity and the centripetal force of diversity to value individuals and for mission integration in their practices, respectively.

The authors highlighted a practical matter of internal communication by connecting the concepts of diversity and internal audience segmentation. However, the generalizability of the results must be assessed in other settings.

While managing diversity involves valuing employees as individuals, the segmentation concept can function as a practical and useful intermediate tool for managing diversity. Practitioners can utilize varied sets of segmented variables according to their contexts.

The authors emphasized valuing employees as individuals and developed a managerial way to make personal differences an asset to the productivity of an organization and society.

Introducing a segmentation approach to internal communication and adopting a set of useful statistical techniques, the authors attempted to develop a unique managing model of diversity. The authors suggested a dynamic and substantial segmentation of an internal audience with a smaller set of appropriate variables in each context.

This paper aims to show the viability of consociational power-sharing as a conflict-resolution tool in Syria. It further argues that a subsequent movement from consociational to centripetal power-sharing is vital to ensure sustainable peace.

A theoretical overview of power-sharing as a conflict-resolution tool provides the basis for this paper, supported by empirical evidence and qualitative research analysis for its proposed application in Syria. Perceived obstacles to a negotiated settlement are outlined, with suggestions made as to how these issues can be transformed into incentives for invested parties. Such obstacles include Bashar al-Assad remaining in power, and calls for the implementation of Shari’a law by some opposition groups.

While previously the conditions of the conflict were not conducive to peace talks, this paper finds that regional developments, including the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, have re-opened the possibility of, and indeed the necessity for, political negotiations. Detailing the complexity of a conflict that goes far beyond a mere sectarian divide, the findings of this paper dispel the notion that a sectarian partition is a viable model for Syria. The paper highlights the multiple cleavages occurring simultaneously, and shows how a power-sharing model is best suited to deal with them.

The paper analyses the ongoing inertia of political negotiations to peacefully resolve the conflict. It offers an approach to conflict-resolution in Syria that has, thus far, not been adequately considered in academic – or political – spheres.

This paper aims to improve the accuracy of robot payload identification and decrease the complexity in its industrial application by developing a new method based on the actuator current.

Instead of previous general robot dynamic modeling of the actuators, links, together with payload inertial parameters, the paper discovers that the difference of the actuator torque between the robot moving along the same trajectory with and without carrying payload can be described as a function of the payload inertial parameters directly. Then a direct dynamic identification model of payload is built, a set of specialized novel exciting trajectories are designed for accurate identification and the least square method is applied for the estimation of the load parameters.

The experiments confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method in robot payload identification. The identification accuracy is greatly improved compared with that of existing methods based on the actuator current and is close to the accuracy of the methods that direct use the wrist-mounted force-torque sensor.

As the provided experiments indicate, the proposed method expands the application range and greatly improves the accuracy, hence making payload identification fully operational in the industrial application.

The novelty of such an identification method is that it does not require the rotor inertias and inertial parameters of links as a prior knowledge, and the specially designed trajectories provide completed decoupling of the load parameters.

The viable systems theory of autonomous social communities is a cybernetic theory in which politics is seen as a facilitator for social coherence. A recent paper by Yolles explored this dimension, considering, how power and its process affects structure, manipulates information, and influences the way that people behave. A core conceptualization of that paper about political temperament is corrected and further developed.

Interest in this paper lies in the social cybernetics of autonomous social communities that have a culture, normative behaviour, and where the behaviour is ultimately determined from that culture. Autonomous social communities that have a culture have a history and dynamic that can be argued to have a potential for behavioural coherence through policy formation and processes of action research. It is through this proposition that politics is engaged in the theory.

This paper offers a correction and development of Yolle's conceptual representation of the notion of political temperament as discussed by Duverger. Political temperament is a part of political culture, and is ultimately connected to the way that power is created, assigned and used. Yolles was concerned with the relationship between political temperament, political management, and processes of power distribution. However, this model was misconceived, and we shall redefine it by expressing political temperament as the relationship between political mindedness, political management, and political centripetality (or process of power distribution).

In this paper it is argued that political temperament comes from a set of attitudes that underpin the political nature of a governing body that becomes responsible for the political management of a social community. It is seen to contribute to the formation of the political culture of autonomous social communities.

The purpose of this paper is to see if economic regionalization in Asia is a trend for the future, and if it heralds educational regionalization, thus uniting economic internationalization and education.

This has been shown to be the case in the European Union where it is still a work in progress and may well be sliding backward, and it is certainly the case in Asia where despite or perhaps because of the plethora of regional organizations (well over 100), policies and programs, to say nothing of the continuing historical tensions between nations and sub‐regions, the process of harmonization has lurched along and questions remain as to its long‐term substance.

It is suggested that the proposition of these goals is much easier than the implementation for a variety of political, economic, and cultural reasons.

In this study a conceptual framework utilizing the concepts of centripetal and centrifugal forces is introduced to facilitate a focus on the forces and factors affecting regionalization and harmonization of higher education in the Asian region.