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The purposes of this paper are to analyze the path and speed of rural transformation (RT) and explore the relationship between farmer's income and RT as well as structural transformation (ST) and typology of RT in the past four decades in China.

Based on the major indicators of RT and ST, graphic illustration is used to analyze the relationships between these indicators and farmer's income using the time-series and cross-provincial data in 1978–2017.

While China has experienced significant RT and ST, the levels and speeds of these transformations differed largely among provinces. Higher and faster RT and ST are often positively associated with the higher and faster growth of rural income. Based on this study, a general typology of rural and structural transformations and rural income is developed. The likely impacts of institutions, policies and investments (IPIs) on RT are discussed.

The authors believe that the findings of this study provide the insights on regional RT and ST and policy implications to increase farmer's income through facilitating and speeding up RT and ST with appropriate IPIs during the rural transformation.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between structural change and economic growth for a panel of four developing countries, namely, Malaysia, Nigeria, Turkey and Indonesia over 1960-2010.

The study extent the growth equation by incorporating degree of openness, labour and investment and construct structural change indices – modified Lilien index and the norm of absolute values. It utilizes the recently developed panel cointegration techniques to test and estimate the long-run equilibrium of the growth equation.

The results confirm that structural change and economic growth are cointegrated at the panel level, indicating the presence of long-run equilibrium relationship. However, the impact of structural change on economic growth seems to be small and evolve slowly.

The findings indicate the need for policymakers to identify the binding constraints that impede growth and the importance of institutionalize policy to encourage investment in productive sectors.

The present document presents the possible contributions of strategic design to organizational transformation, as a part of business intellectual capital.

A case study from a Colombian family business group, with three business units, industrial, commercial and service, were used. Interviews regarding critical events and semi-structured interviews were employed. Data were processed with NVivo software.

It was found that abductive, empathetic and creative competencies (human capital) that may facilitate the comprehension of nature, needs and alternatives to be employed in organizational change processes. Further, the importance of the participative design approach in co-creation, with interest groups, transformation projects (relational capital), and design thought, as a methodology for the implementation of the preceding (structural capital), was identified.

The results revealed, in this case, suggest several future investigative routes. Firstly, increased empirical research, based on this proposal, is suggested. Specifically, it would be relevant to perform causal studies that report the contribution of each of the components of strategic design to the diverse organizational transformation processes. A third line of investigation might include delving into certain relationships that have already been identified, but require further comparison. One of these might be the role of design thought as a method to perform specific organizational transformation projects.

As a result of the present investigation, a model is established (see Figure 2) which may be useful to companies to address organizational transformation, capitalizing on the benefits offered by strategic design. In summary, the proposal considers four phases (see the central circle in Figure 2). Phase 1: understanding organizational occurrences and situations, the basis upon which to determine the nature of an organizational transformation. This activity alludes to the work that is collaboratively managed with different interest groups, in the systematic comprehension of the business organizational transformation chain of events. Phase 2: determining the path to be followed or the route for collaborative action. Doing so in participative fashion permits the representation of a diversity of ideas and opinions on a given problem/potential identified in the preceding process. This stimulates and strengthens the creative competency in company personnel (Jeffries, 2007). If this competency is incorporated into the corporate culture, differential factors may be established, in an environment with broad competency, thus achieving transformations appropriate for a competitive environment.

Co-creation, the central axis of the organizational transformation process. At the base of all organizational transformation processes is an approach focused on human beings, whose principal questions include: What place do individuals have in strategic problem resolution, like those of organizational transformation, in companies? How are human competencies strengthened when applied to organizational transformation processes? What types of ties are made, beyond the establishment of natural relationships (work, purchase, sell), with interest groups? And most importantly: How do they achieve the construction of new business realities together? To do this, participative and co-creative methods must be employed as a scenario to jointly achieve multiple satisfaction realities, in which understanding the essence of the participative design approach becomes meaningful (Jones, 2015).

Design thought, as a methodological proposal for organizational transformation projects. The use of inspiration, ideation, and implementation stages, iteratively and permanently, is suggested. Continuous review of the point of departure, the path trodden and the goals to be achieved should be prioritized, such that they may act as compasses for organizational transformation, considering strategic design to be a key motor (Yee et al., 2017).

The purpose of this paper is to study the influence of intellectual capital on a firm’s absorptive capacity (ACAP), and of ACAP on product innovation. The authors argue that intellectual capital and other sets of intangible assets are mobilized by firms through dynamic capabilities such as ACAP. Product innovation is one of the results of this process.

A quantitative study was conducted, including 500 firms of different sizes, industries and technological intensities located in southern Brazil. The validity of constructs and the theoretical model were confirmed by structural equation modeling.

The authors found that intellectual capital does influence ACAP, albeit differently on each of ACAP’s dimensions. Acquisition, assimilation and exploitation of knowledge are more decisively influenced by structural capital, followed by human capital. The ability of transformation of knowledge is evenly influenced by structural and human capital, and more moderately so by social capital. The results also showed that ACAP influences product innovation, but each of its dimensions demonstrated a different impact.

This study helps practitioners to identify the development of a firm’s intangible resources and its influences on product innovation. This characterization can serve as a benchmark for managers or private and public companies to define strategies and policies to stimulate innovation.

Few studies present a theoretical discussion about the relationship between a firm’s resources and ACAP’s dimensions in broad empirical contexts or in emerging countries.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how the unfolding diet transformation in East and Southern Africa is likely to influence the evolution of employment within its agrifood system (AFS) and between that system and the rest of the economy. To briefly consider implications for education and skill acquisition.

The authors link changing diets to employment structure. The authors then use alternative projections of diet change over 15- and 30-year intervals to develop scenarios on changes in employment structure.

As long as incomes in ESA continue to rise at levels near those of the past decade, the transformation of their economies is likely to advance dramatically. Key features will be: sharp decline in the share of the workforce engaged in farming even as absolute numbers rise modestly, sharp increase in the share engaged in non-farm segments of the AFS, and an even sharper increase in the share engaged outside the AFS. Within the AFS, food preparation away from home is likely to grow most rapidly, followed by food manufacturing, and finally by marketing, transport, and other AFS services. Resource booms in Mozambique and (potentially) Tanzania are the main factor that may change this pattern.

Clarifying policy implications requires renewed research given the rapid changes in Africa over the past 15 years.

This is the first paper to explicitly link changing diets to changing employment within the AFS.

Although there has been substantial academic and practitioner interest into innovative structural arrangements, the study of structural transformation and the structural practices of small to medium‐sized organizations in traditional industries has been relatively ignored. This article presents empirical evidence of a company that changed its organizational structure from a traditional bureaucracy to a structure that was fundamentally different from those of other firms within its industry. The changed structure was characterized by many novel attributes such as devolved responsibility, empowerment, community orientation and a lack of hierarchy. Although there was some evidence to suggest that the structure had positive performance implications, the study also finds that the content, context and process of change were influenced by a dominant managing director such that the outcomes masked underlying political issues. The article concludes by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of the findings.

This paper investigates the inter‐relationships between different components of intellectual capital (IC) and value creation.

A single in‐depth case‐study of an innovation project within an Australian financial services firm (“TransactCo”) is conducted.

The actual IC inter‐relationships and transformations that occurred were different to those originally envisaged by organisational participants, and reflected choices about IC deployment and transformation. Considering IC‐in‐action, inter‐relationships between different IC elements and value creation were found to be pluralistic and temporally contingent.

The limitations of the paper are as follows: the use of a single case study design limits its generalisability; the empirical analyses was conducted at a project‐level and may not be transferable to other levels of analyses; and a narrow conception of value was utilised, grounded in economic value and shareholder value terms. Extending the analyses conducted to other settings represent future research opportunities.

Theoretically, in contrast to prior empirical studies which depict IC inter‐relationships as primarily consisting of multiple relations of cause‐and‐effect in a one‐to‐one or one‐to‐many manner, the narrative presented herein shows how IC resources transform each other, often in a pluralistic and fluid manner. In addition, the paper calls for a perspective on IC‐in‐action. Specifically, more narrative on the use of IC and its deployment should be incorporated within extant models to highlight the contingent and precarious IC and value creation relationship. Firms that fail to consider this adequately may face unintended value destruction consequences similar to those observed at TransactCo.

The purpose of this study is to explore the mechanisms underlying the transformation of records management (RM) to digital processes in the context of electronic records management systems (ERMS). The aim is to facilitate the evaluation of the long-term performance of ERMS and the effectiveness of the current standards.

Qualitative methods, such as participant observation and the constructivist grounded theory, were applied on a case of ERMS implementation in the Chinese public sector.

The results revealed that the application of transition-oriented ERMS would stimulate restructuring in the RM pattern and expectation on the functions of ERMS, with information quality underlying as a key challenging factor. The above-stated factors together drive the digital transformation of RM. A model for this mechanism is provided in the present study.

The selected case serves as an example for the cases that are not conditional on enforcing the electronic documents and RMS. As preliminary research, only one case has been studied here. However, it is possible to conduct other case studies to develop a further understanding of the transformation process.

The novelty of the present study is that it draws attention to the challenges encountered in moving RM towards digital transformation, by providing a theoretical foundation for developing sustainable evaluations of the ERMS and the associated current standards.

The purpose of this paper is to formally verify the composition of web services to reduce inconsistencies in software architectures.

In order to check the web services composition, the authors use a model‐driven engineering (MDE)‐based approach and to achieve the formalization of web service composition in ACME and check the consistency of this composition, the authors introduce the pattern mediation to formalize web services composition with the ADL ACME, using the concept of architectural style of ACME. Subsequently, a scenario shows how this style can be used in ACMEStudio to detect inconsistencies. The example shows a web travel organization application.

The authors ensure reliability defined through non‐functional properties. To do so, use ACME was used to check assembling consistency of web service composition. In a second part, a SWC2ACME tool was designed and implemented to check if the web services meta‐model conforms to ACME model.

The paper describes a framework which has proven to be useful to ensure a safe design and execution of software architectures, specifically web services composition.