Search results

This research investigates Hong Kong academic librarians' attitudes toward robotic process automation (RPA) and their willingness to learn this technology.

This qualitative study collected data through one-on-one semi-structured interviews conducted with video conferencing software. After participants received basic RPA information and three existing library application cases, they answered questions based on the interview guide. This research used the inductive thematic analysis method to analyze the collected data.

Regarding Hong Kong academic librarians' attitudes towards RPA, 19 themes were identified. Although all participants did not have previous knowledge of RPA, most showed positive attitudes toward implementing RPA in their libraries and some willingness to learn it. Besides, among all identified themes, negative attitudes mainly comprised “Affect” and “Cognition” factors, hindering RPA deployment in academic libraries.

This research helps librarians and RPA vendors make better decisions or strategies for implementing RPA for libraries, which has not been explored, especially in East Asia.

This research highlights age-specific barriers to employment for older workers and the gap between activation policy design and implementation, focusing on difficulties in extending working life under employment support services.

This research employed a qualitative approach, utilizing semi-structured interviews to gather perspectives on extending the working lives of older adults. Eighteen experienced social workers who worked in employment support services for older workers who aged fifty-five and above participated in the study.

This study underscores the importance of comprehensively understanding the heterogeneity of individuals' circumstances and emphasizes the impact of intersectionality on the development of extending working life. It incorporates individual and familial difficulties, including considering caregiving responsibilities, health issues and housing challenges before exploring employment-related concerns. The study also highlights external factors influencing older workers' employment prospects, including employer perspectives, government support levels and public recognition of the necessity to extend working life.

This research sheds light on the impact of welfare-related stigma, which imposes obstacles and inflexibility on older workers seeking employment. It ultimately contributes to the sustainability and dynamism of the Asia–Pacific workforce while also informing regional discussions on social security and welfare services.

It uniquely employs the perspectives of social workers providing employment support services to highlight challenges and policy gaps in extending the working lives of older workers in Hong Kong. It also provides practical insights into strategies and mechanisms for extending working life across diverse social contexts.

With the increasing computation and communication speed of mobile devices, their use and roles have been repositioned to act more than a communication tool. Around 0.4 million foreign domestic helpers (FDHs) form an integral part of Hong Kong society and have the highest concentrations of FDHs worldwide, but scant studies focus on their mobile technology usage. This study aims to discuss the aforementioned issue.

This research investigated mobile technology usage by 145 FDHs in Hong Kong with a quantitative survey, covering their actual mobile technology usage, perceptions, influences and adoption barriers.

Besides communication and connection with friends and family, participants used mobile technology for information seeking, productivity, utility and entertainment. Perception of usefulness was the greatest influence, and they would use any mobile technology once its basic function supports their daily needs. They considered no “very serious barrier,” though data tariff was their biggest concern. Overall, there were some significant differences between genders in the usage of mobile technologies.

Scant studies focus on the mobile technology usage of FDHs. The results reveal the usefulness of mobile technologies to FDHs for government policy-making and for employers and employment agencies to better support the FHDs' daily lives.

This study aims at proposing and testing a model delineating how and when the quality of a special B2B professional service, investment relations (IR), would drive corporate intangible value.

This study employs a proprietary dataset on voting records of an annual investment relations (IR) awards event and the corresponding company-level archival data for analysis. Regression analysis is used to test hypotheses.

IR service quality not only directly enhances corporate intangible value, but also indirectly boosts it via information transparency. While competitive intensity does not moderate the relationship between IR service quality and corporate intangible value, its moderating effect on the relationship between information transparency and this value is negative.

The findings advance academic understanding of the mechanism and boundary conditions underlying the complex and dynamic relationships among IR service quality, information transparency, corporate intangible value and competitive intensity. Future research endeavors to verify the present findings in other service and/or geographic settings would help establish their external validity.

The findings advise companies to expand the traditional role of IR by taking it as a powerful communication and relationship marketing tool to improve their visibility and attract investors.

The findings suggest that superior IR service would strengthen the company’s social bonding with institutional investors and effectively signal to them its commitment to good corporate governance practices.

Matching a proprietary dataset on IR voting records with the corresponding company-level archival data over a five-year period to investigate the performance implications of IR service quality within the Hong Kong context rectifies methodological limitation and geographic confinement of prior IR research.

The study aims to draw on the self-congruity theory to investigate the relationship among destination personality (DP), self-congruity and tourists’ pro-environmental behavioral intention (BI) among Guangzhou citizens who have experienced nature-based tourism (NBT).

The survey-based quantitative research was divided into two rounds, namely, a preliminary study exploring the dimensions of DP and the verification of whether the DP dimensions that significantly affect pro-environmental BI in step one would be selected for the main research to validate the conceptual model.

The results suggest that wholesome, one of the destination personalities, strongly predicts tourists’ pro-environmental BI, while actual self-congruity plays a mediating role between sincere, another DP, and tourists’ pro-environmental BI.

In practice, it offers multidimensional knowledge and robust evidence-based recommendations for the sustainable development and destination branding of NBT destinations in the post-epidemic era.

The study presents pioneering work that reveals previously underestimated factors influencing pro-environmental BI.

With the increasing agility of IT enterprises, it is crucial to identify suitable managerial strategies for controlling information system development (ISD) projects in the new agile working environments. These environments are characterized by the collaborative nature of work and the recurring nature of communication. This study aims to explore how perceived transparency in ISD processes, controlled by transparency strategies, impacts project quality.

In collaboration with a firm that implemented a customized Scaled Agile Framework, questionnaires were distributed to employees involved in ISD projects. The goal was to understand the influence of perceived transparency in ISD processes on project quality.

Our research demonstrates that perceived transparency in ISD processes enhances project quality through knowledge exchange by strengthening goodwill trust among team members. Additionally, transparency improves project quality through client feedback by strengthening competence trust of clients toward the team. Goodwill trust of clients toward the team and competence trust among team members have less impact on project quality enhancement.

This study reveals the nomological network among the perceived transparency, different types of trust among stakeholders, social interactions among stakeholders, and project outcomes in agile ISD environments. This nomological network has been overlooked by previous studies that biased toward top-down, interorganizational communication. It highlights that not all types of trust among stakeholders are involved in the processes through which perceived transparency influences ISD project quality in agile working environments. Additionally, it exposes the limitations of transparency strategies for controlling projects in agile IT enterprises.

Although research on how the downstream calculations of a patent’s profit potential influence invention renewal decisions is extensive, the impact of the upstream knowledge creation stages is overlooked. The purpose of this study is to address this theoretical vacuum by examining the intra-organizational configuration of knowledge networks and collaboration networks.

The data consist of 491 global pharmaceutical firms that patent in the USA. Drawing on patent records, the authors simultaneously construct intra-organizational knowledge networks and collaboration networks and identify network cohesion features (i.e. local and global). The authors employ panel fixed-effects models to test the hypotheses.

The results show that local knowledge cohesion and local social cohesion decrease invention renewals, while global knowledge cohesion and global social cohesion increase renewals. Moreover, the marginal effects of local and global social cohesion are stronger than those of local and global knowledge cohesion, respectively.

The hypotheses are tested using the pharmaceutical industry as a research setting, which limits the generalizability of our findings. In addition, potential formal and informal contingencies are not considered.

Despite its limitations, this study provides valuable implications. First, managers are cautioned against the adverse effects of local cohesion structures on invention renewal. Second, firms can dynamically adjust their local and global network configuration strategies to harmonize the generation of valuable inventions and the retention of good ideas.

Complementary to previous research that focused on inventions’ performance feedback, this study delves into upstream knowledge creation stages to understand invention renewals.

The purpose of this study is to develop a straightforward method for creating a non – toxic metal oxide sensor capable of detecting melamine in milk at ambient temperature.

A low temperature, straightforward solution-based approach, specifically the hydrothermal method was utilized to apply the active sensing layer onto the substrate. Subsequently, analysis of the cyclic voltammetry (CV) profile was conducted to detect the concentration of melamine and determine its sensitivity.

An experimental analysis was performed on a nontoxic metal oxide-based sensor fabricated for detecting melamine sensitivity using the CV profile. The sensor’s performance was evaluated under three different concentrations of melamine (0.1 mmol, 0.2 mmol and 0.3 mmol). The results demonstrated a satisfactory sensitivity of 0.0297 µAmM⁻¹cm⁻² with a response time of 2 s.

The primary innovation of this research lies in the creation of a nontoxic and environmentally friendly sensor. The synthesis method employed featured significantly lower temperatures compared to existing literatures. Furthermore, the sensor achieved enhanced sensitivity along with rapid response times.

Digital technology, which is regarded as a prominent and transformational force in modern society, encompasses a wide variety of technology that utilize digital data to process, store and transfer various types of information. Digital technologies have continually been introduced as cutting-edge information tools in order to achieve effective management of vast information that arises from the prefabrication supply chain. However, without a sufficient performance evaluation, drawbacks of technology investment, such as financial losses and ineffective resource allocation, keep occurring, which hinders the widespread implementation of digital technologies. This study demonstrates a comprehensive evaluation of digital technologies’ effects on the prefabrication supply chain based on multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) theory.

Specifically, the targeted digital technologies and project constraints were first identified through a systematic literature review. The effects of the digital technologies were then scored using a questionnaire survey. The TOPSIS model was established to quantitatively rank the effectiveness of selected digital technologies.

Overall, BIM technology shone out in the rankings and is regarded as the most beneficial digital solution by multi-stakeholders to the existing constraints, such as working efficiency. Collaboration patterns between different stakeholders and technology integration trend were also indicated.

Compared with existing outcomes, this study specifically focused on examining the effects of digital technologies on the prefabrication supply chain, the most significant link in the process for prefabricated structures. New findings indicate the overall performance that considered both multi-stakeholders’ preferences and project constraints. The quantitative evaluation presents a comprehensive understanding of digital technologies’ effects, enabling industrial participants to reach well-informed, strategic and profitable investment decisions.

This study examines principal rotation in China to gain empirical insights from the policy analysis and succession strategies that principals employ to gain internal and external support in their new schools.

We employed document analysis and a case study approach. Interviews were conducted with officials in 5 local educational agencies and 40 principals from 5 different regions who were undergoing rotation. Thematic analysis was used to identify common patterns and themes in the interview responses.

We explored how the principal-rotation policy was implemented, including the goals, standards, targeted principals, tools and other aspects of the policy in China. The study revealed the challenges faced by the rotated principals and their succession strategies.

Our study contributes to the field of educational leadership by shedding light on the implementation and impact of principal rotation in mainland China.