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Based on recent reviews regarding its use in information systems (IS) studies, this paper argues that action research is still not well recognized by IS researchers and mainstream IS journals especially in North America. To make the situation worse, existing criteria used to assess the quality of action research studies are found to be inadequate when applied to IS. In order to advance its understanding and use by IS researchers and practitioners, the IS action research framework proposed recently by Lau is refined and presented as a set of guidelines in this paper. The implications of this refined framework on IS research and practice are discussed.

Oyster cultivation has a long history in Pearl River Delta area and is one of the traditional aquaculture depending strongly on the natural coastal resource because of the expected variation of salinity, temperature and diversity of infaunal organisms for the cultivation practice. Apart from being the traditional knowledge inherited through the coastal communities over the centuries, oyster aquaculture is also embedded in the long-term socio-economic relationships among communities that have a rich experience regarding the quality and quantity controls for the long-term sustainable coastal resource management, together with a strong sense of responsibility for safeguarding and promoting the local food heritage for various reasons. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper seeks to examine oyster cultivation in Lau Fau Shan (literally means floating mountain) in Hong Kong, not only from the cultural–historical perspectives but also from the social resilience perspectives, such as how and why local communities are willing to inherit the traditions, what kinds of roles NGOs and government play in oyster cultivation, why local people should be engaged, and how the oyster aquaculture/industry underwent the transformations, given all the difficulties and challenges.

The value of oyster cultivation is not only for food production but also for the global exchange of experiences on social resilience for both school and public educations.

It is an original research making use of a local case study for the understanding of post-disaster reconstruction of coastal communities in the global context.

Flexible return policies are offered by the manufacturers to encourage the retailers announcing a lenient returns scheme to their customers.

This study considers the distribution of durable products in a supply chain where the demand is sensitive to sales effort and retail price. Using a game theoretic framework, the paper presents an assessment of the strategic effect of flexible returns policy announced by the manufacturer under retail competition and highlights its implications on profitability.

Comparative analysis of monopolistic and duopolistic competition provides a better understanding about the repercussions and related facts on offering a flexible returns policy in these environments. It is profitable for the manufacturer to offer a flexible returns policy when there is retail competition than under monopolistic condition.

Practitioners view returns policy offered as an insurance given to the buyers and they infer it to be a better mechanism for doing business. Lenient returns policy promotes the sales by increasing the trust on the retailer and boosts up the perception of quality about the product by lowering the perceived risk for customers.

Effective product return strategies such as being lenient in terms of time, money, effort, scope and exchange can result in increased revenues, lower cost and improved profitability to the manufacturer and retailer, at the same time offering an enhanced level of customer service.

The purpose of this paper is to numerically analyze the coordinating mechanism of the revenue‐sharing contract in newsvendor products' supply chain. The contract considers stochastic and price‐dependent demand.

The paper presents an analytical model for supply chain contracts and then uses numerical methods with the Stackelberg game to identify the contracts' properties.

Comparing the revenue‐sharing contract with the price‐only contract, the paper finds that a revenue‐sharing contract does improve supply chain performance. However, the benefits earned by the revenue‐sharing contract differ among the supply chain partners under the impact of demand variability and price‐sensitivity factors. Specifically, the manufacturer will earn a greater share in channel profit in the revenue‐sharing contract than in case of a price‐only contract. Also, the incentive by revenue‐sharing contract could not lead to Pareto improvement. In other words, the retailer's profit in revenue‐sharing contract might be lower than that in price‐only contract.

Management should note that there are additional administrative costs needed to monitor the revenue‐sharing contract. Incorporating these costs into models will yield more insight into the problems. Also, the retailer has more accurate market information due to the proximity to the customers that will lead to a different game mode.

Management such as airlines, hotel, video rental, etc. can adopt this kind of contracts to manage their retailers to obtain the higher channel performance. But they should be careful selecting the revenue sharing proportion. The research limitations also give some suggestion for practical reference.

Many studies have shown that the revenue‐sharing contract can obtain a higher channel performance. However, little attention has been noted that the fraction of shared revenue has a significant impact on the channel performance. To apply this form of incentive in practice, managements should consider the impact of the fraction of shared revenue in the revenue‐sharing contract on supply chain performance. This paper considers these issues.

Examines the extent to which social policy adopted by the colonial government in Hong Kong (prior to its hand‐over China in 1997) has set the agenda for the government of the newly formed Special Administrative Region (SAR). Chronicles the historical development of social policy in Hong Kong since the inception of the colonial government in 1842; identifies that, with the exception of a short‐lived period of expansionism (stimulated by social unrest in the mid‐1960’s) social welfare provision appears to have been low on the government’s agenda and incremental in nature ‐ the emphasis being on economic growth, rather than public spending on welfare programmes. Examines the strengths and weaknesses of this incremental approach; outlines the commitment of the SAR government to the market economy and its proposals for a modest increase in welfare provision, essentially building on the legacy left behind by the colonial government.

This bibliography contains references to papers, conference proceedings, theses and books dealing with finite strip, finite prism and finite layer analysis of structures, materially and/or geometrically linear or non‐linear.

This paper aims to develop a genetic algorithm (GA)‐based process knowledge integration system (GA‐PKIS) for generalizing a set of nearly optimal fuzzy rules in quality enhancement based on the extracted fuzzy association rules in a supply chain network.

The proposed methodology provides all levels of employees with the ability to formulate nearly optimal sets of fuzzy rules to identify possible solutions for eliminating the number of defect items.

The application of the proposed methodology in the slider manufacturer has been studied. After performing the spatial analysis, the results obtained indicate that it is capable of ensuring the finished products with promising quality.

In order to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, only some processes within the supply chain are chosen. Future studies can advance this research by applying the proposed approach in different industries and processes.

Because of the complexity of the logistics operations along the supply chain, the traditional quality improvement approaches cannot address all the quality problems automatically and effectively. This newly developed GA‐based approach can help to optimize the process parameters along the supply chain network.

This study aims to examine two individual dispositions, propensity to trust and reciprocation wariness, as antecedents of team–member exchange (TMX) and how shared leadership moderates these relationships. It also investigates work engagement as a consequence of TMX.

Data were collected from 175 employees in 42 teams; a multilevel random slope model was used to test the moderating effect of shared leadership at the team level and across levels.

Shared leadership provides a boundary condition for the relationships from propensity to trust and reciprocation wariness to work engagement through TMX. At the individual level, the positive effects of propensity to trust and negative effects of reciprocation wariness on TMX, and their indirect effects on work engagement through TMX, were weaker at higher shared leadership. At the team level, the positive relationship between propensity to trust and TMX was unconditional on shared leadership, whereas the relationship between reciprocation wariness and TMX was moderated by shared leadership. At the team level, shared leadership had positive effects on TMX and work engagement.

Managers can adopt shared leadership to encourage social exchanges among team members to enhance TMX and work engagement.

The study extends the TMX research by investigating dispositions as antecedents and work engagement as a consequence at both individual and team levels. It also identifies the moderating role played by team-level shared leadership, which provides a strong situation supporting reciprocal interactions.

The Art of War, by the ancient Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu, is the most famous work on military operation in ancient China and the books have been repeatedly translated, investigated and discussed. Today, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War remains a compulsory text in major military schools around the world and its influences on twentieth century military thinking is undisputed. Also in recent times, the use of military strategies in the business and management contexts is increasing. This paper proposes a set of criteria based on Sun Tzu’s philosophy for evaluation of business management strategies against the world class business excellence models. The total quality management models of the European Quality Award and the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award are used to compare with Sun Tzu’s business management strategy model developed under the quality function deployment (QFD) methodology. The results of the QFD methodology can be used as performance indicators showing organisations’ improvement priorities for self‐assessment.