Search results

The interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become burgeoning in the construction industry as firms are under constant pressure from socially conscious stakeholders to demonstrate their efforts to address various CSR issues. This study aims to unveil the key practices and impact factors (KPIFs) of CSR implementation in construction firms and the interrelationships among different key impact factors toward attaining CSR practices.

Mobilizing the integrated institutional, stakeholder and self-determination theories, a theoretical framework was first developed to elaborate the potential inter-relationships among the key impact factors toward CSR implementation. Data were collected from extra-grade contractors through an online questionnaire survey and was then analyzed by the partial least square structural equation modeling method.

The results show that construction firms' CSR practices could be classified into eight distinct key dimensions, e.g. shareholders' interests, government commitment and environment preservation. It is found that three groups of key impact factors – external institutional factors (especially coercive-normative factors), intrinsic factors (especially strategic business direction and organizational culture) and identified factors (i.e. the perceived importance of CSR practices) – have statistically significant positive impacts on most key dimensions of CSR practices.

The research findings have implications for top management to better understand CSR implementation, thereby helping them secure legitimacy to survive and advance in the competitive construction businesses.

The findings contribute to the theoretical body of knowledge in CSR by modeling and empirically demonstrating the influence mechanism of CSR implementation in construction within an integrated model.

With the evolution of the turbulent environment constantly triggering the emergence of a trust crisis between organizations, how can university–industry (U–I) alliances respond to the trust crisis when conducting green technology innovation (GTI) activities? This paper aims to address this issue.

The authors examined the process of trust crisis damage, including trust first suffering instantaneous impair as well as subsequently indirectly affecting GTI level, and ultimately hurting the profitability of green innovations. In this paper, a piecewise deterministic dynamic model is deployed to portray the trust and the GTI levels in GTI activities of U–I alliances.

The authors analyze the equilibrium results under decentralized and centralized decision-making modes to obtain the following conclusions: Trust levels are affected by a combination of hazard and damage (short and long term) rates, shifting from steady growth to decline in the presence of low hazard and damage rates. However, the GTI level has been growing steadily. It is essential to consider factors such as the hazard rate, the damage rate in the short and long terms, and the change in marginal profit in determining whether to pursue an efficiency- or recovery-friendly strategy in the face of a trust crisis. The authors found that two approaches can mitigate trust crisis losses: implementing a centralized decision-making mode (i.e. shared governance) and reducing pre-crisis trust-building investments. This study offers several insights for businesses and academics to respond to a trust crisis.

The present research can be extended in several directions. Instead of distinguishing attribution of trust crisis, the authors use hazard rate, short- and long-term damage rates and change in marginal profitability to distinguish the scale of trust crises. Future scholars can further add an attribution approach to enrich the classification of trust crises. Moreover, the authors only consider trust crises because of unexpected events in a turbulent environment; in fact, a trust crisis may also be a plateauing process, yet the authors do not study this situation.

First, the authors explore what factors affect the level of trust and the level of GTI when a trust crisis occurs. Second, the authors provide guidelines on how businesses and academics can coordinate their trust-building and GTI efforts when faced with a trust crisis in a turbulent environment.

First, the interaction between psychology and innovation management is explored in this paper. Although empirical studies have shown that trust in U–I alliances is related to innovation performance, and scholars have developed differential game models to portray the GTI process, building a differential game model to explore such an interaction is still scarce. Second, the authors incorporate inter-organizational trust level into the GTI level in university–industry collaboration, applying differential equations to portray the trust building and GTI processes, respectively, to reveal the importance of trust in CTI activities. Third, the authors establish a piecewise deterministic dynamic game model wherein the impact of crisis shocks is not equal to zero, which is inconsistent with most previous studies of Brownian motion.

The purpose of this study is to explain the following questions: First, whether the executive equity incentive has an impact on enterprise innovation and digital transformation; Second, if there is any influence, whether there is difference between state-owned enterprises and private enterprises in the research conclusions; Third, whether the digital transformation of enterprises has had an intermediary effect between executive equity incentive and enterprise innovation; Fourth, whether the proportion of independent directors in the corporate governance mechanism has a regulatory effect.

In the context of China's promotion of “digital China” construction and high-quality development of economic innovation, this paper takes Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies in 2011–2019 as a sample, empirically studies the linear and nonlinear relationship between executive equity incentive and enterprise digital transformation and innovation, and further considers the regulatory effect of heterogeneous property rights and the proportion of independent directors, with a view to improving the reform of China's enterprise equity incentive system make contributions to enterprise innovation and digital transformation.

The results show that executive equity incentive has a positive role in promoting enterprise digital transformation and innovation, and enterprise digital transformation has a positive role in promoting enterprise innovation; Digital transformation of enterprises has a partial intermediary effect between executive equity incentive and enterprise innovation.

First, it expands the research on the economic consequences of enterprise salary incentive system. Second, it expands the research on the specific role path of enterprise digital economy transformation. Third, provide new ideas for the reform of corporate governance mechanism.

The study aims to devise a comprehensive evaluation model (CEM) for evaluating spatial equity in the layout of elderly service facilities (ESFs) to address the inequity in the layout of ESFs within city center communities characterized by limited land resources and a dense elderly population.

The CEM incorporates a suite of analytical tools, including accessibility assessment, Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient evaluations and spatial autocorrelation analysis. Utilizing this model, the study scrutinized the distributional equity of three distinct categories of ESFs in the city center of Xi’an and proposed targeted optimization strategies.

The findings reveal that (1) there are disparities in ESFs’ accessibility among different categories and communities, manifesting a distinct center (high) and periphery (low) distribution pattern; (2) there exists inequality in ESFs distribution, with nearly 50% of older adults accessing only 18% of elderly services, and these inequalities are more pronounced in urban areas with lower accessibility, and (3) approximately 14.7% of communities experience a supply-demand disequilibrium, with demand surpassing supply as a predominant issue in the ongoing development of ESFs.

The CEM formulated in this study offers policymakers, urban planners and service providers a scientific foundation and guidance for decision-making or policy amendment by promptly assessing and pinpointing areas of spatial inequity in ESFs and identifying deficiencies in their development.

Light field images (LFIs) have gained popularity as a technology to increase the field of view (FoV) of plenoptic cameras since they can capture information about light rays with a large FoV. Wide FoV causes light field (LF) data to increase rapidly, which restricts the use of LF imaging in image processing, visual analysis and user interface. Effective LFI coding methods become of paramount importance. This paper aims to eliminate more redundancy by exploring sparsity and correlation in the angular domain of LFIs, as well as mitigate the loss of perceptual quality of LFIs caused by encoding.

This work proposes a new efficient LF coding framework. On the coding side, a new sampling scheme and a hierarchical prediction structure are used to eliminate redundancy in the LFI's angular and spatial domains. At the decoding side, high-quality dense LF is reconstructed using a view synthesis method based on the residual channel attention network (RCAN).

In three different LF datasets, our proposed coding framework not only reduces the transmitted bit rate but also maintains a higher view quality than the current more advanced methods.

(1) A new sampling scheme is designed to synthesize high-quality LFIs while better ensuring LF angular domain sparsity. (2) To further eliminate redundancy in the spatial domain, new ranking schemes and hierarchical prediction structures are designed. (3) A synthetic network based on RCAN and a novel loss function is designed to mitigate the perceptual quality loss due to the coding process.

Traffic flow prediction has always been a top priority of intelligent transportation systems. There are many mature methods for short-term traffic flow prediction. However, the existing methods are often insufficient in capturing long-term spatial-temporal dependencies. To predict long-term dependencies more accurately, in this paper, a new and more effective traffic flow prediction model is proposed.

This paper proposes a new and more effective traffic flow prediction model, named channel attention-based spatial-temporal graph neural networks. A graph convolutional network is used to extract local spatial-temporal correlations, a channel attention mechanism is used to enhance the influence of nearby spatial-temporal dependencies on decision-making and a transformer mechanism is used to capture long-term dependencies.

The proposed model is applied to two common highway datasets: METR-LA collected in Los Angeles and PEMS-BAY collected in the California Bay Area. This model outperforms the other five in terms of performance on three performance metrics a popular model.

(1) Based on the spatial-temporal synchronization graph convolution module, a spatial-temporal channel attention module is designed to increase the influence of proximity dependence on decision-making by enhancing or suppressing different channels. (2) To better capture long-term dependencies, the transformer module is introduced.

Through this study, the aim is to provide reference for the improvement of CEO related theories, the reform of internal governance mechanisms and compensation systems in enterprises, and ultimately contribute to economic and social development and the achievement of dual carbon goals.

In the context of accelerating the implementation of the “dual carbon” goal and promoting sustainable economic and social development, this paper builds a panel data model based on the panel data of 31 provinces in China from 2011 to 2019 to empirically test the impact of CEO stability on green innovation and total factor productivity of enterprises.

The results show that CEO stability has a positive role in promoting enterprise total factor productivity and green innovation and enterprise green innovation also has a positive role in promoting total factor productivity; Heterogeneity testing found that CEO stability has no significant impact on green innovation in state-owned enterprises. Corporate green innovation has a partial mesomeric effect between CEO stability and total factor productivity; The proportion of independent directors has a negative moderating effect on CEO stability and corporate green innovation, while equity incentive has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between CEO stability, corporate total factor productivity and green innovation.

First, it develops the research on CEO stability and its economic consequences. Second, it expands the impact of CEO stability on heterogeneous enterprises. Third, provides new ideas for the reform of internal governance mechanism and salary system of enterprises.

Relationship conflict between the owners and contractors is inevitable, which could induce negative consequences. Yet, the existing literature mostly focused on its direct effects on project performance and ignored the process by which relationship conflict gradually deteriorates cooperation as well as corresponding managerial approaches. Given the fact that relationship conflict originates from interdependent tasks, the proposed theoretical model is intended to measure relational behavior as an instant outcome of relationship conflict, and explore the buffering role of contract enforcement approach.

This paper develops the conceptual model based on the literature review. Then the questionnaire survey was conducted. The dyadic data obtained from 168 Chinese construction project professionals were analyzed by the Partial Least squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) technique.

The results show that relational behavior partially mediates the link between relationship conflict and project performance. Besides, three types of contract enforcement approaches are found to differentially change the negative link between relationship conflict and relational behavior. Rigid contract enforcement can worsen the adverse effects of relationship conflict on relational behavior, whereas flexible contract enforcement can alleviate these negative effects. The level of mitigation hinges on whether compromising behaviors or obliging behaviors are chosen.

The study extends the knowledge of conflict theory and contract theory in the construction field. Based on the proposed conceptual model and PLS-SEM results, this study contributes to the understanding of relationship conflict’s consequences between the owners and contractors and enriches conflict management approaches in the construction field.

In today’s turbulent and complex era, initiative behavior is becoming more drawn to construction projects but challenging to arouse as it is free of the established regulations in project practice. Given the prevalence of social media (SM) in modern workplaces, this study is thereby motivated to investigate whether and how SM use can act to drive initiative behavior of construction project members (PMs) in this context.

This study sharply examines two distinct types of SM use – work-related and social-related – to explore their roles in driving the initiative behavior of construction PMs. Additionally, self-determination theory is employed to explore their underlying translation mechanisms and associated boundary conditions. A survey dataset collected from 229 construction PMs is used to empirically test the proposed theoretical model.

Empirical results show that role-breadth self-efficacy, psychological safety and project identification, by satisfying basic psychological needs respectively, act as crucial bridging roles in translating SM use into initiative behavior of PMs. Such mediation effects are applied to both work-related and social-related SM use with varied mechanisms. Besides, prevention focus is found to be a contingent moderator on these relationships, with a strengthening role toward role-breadth self-efficacy and a weakening role toward project identification.

This study digs into the nuanced mechanisms of how SM use benefits construction projects, especially in terms of PMs’ initiative. The findings of this research afford new insights into effectively invigorating the initiative behavior of construction PMs under the current digital momentum.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationships between tourists’ motivations, perception of tourism impacts, place attachment (PA) and loyalty toward Jallianwala Bagh, a dark heritage site in Punjab, India.

A mixed-method approach comprising qualitative and quantitative methods was used. Semi-structured interviews and the Delphi method helped generate a 34-item survey instrument. A sample size of 869 respondents was obtained, split into two subsets for exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis.

Seven out of nine hypotheses were supported. Motivated tourists perceived higher positive tourism impacts but lower negative tourism impacts. Higher perceptions of positive tourism impacts increased both PA and loyalty to the destination. Surprisingly, the perception of negative tourism impacts did not significantly affect tourist loyalty, contrary to some previous research.

This study informs stakeholders about tourists’ cognitive and affective responses at a dark tourism site, aiding in the planning and development of sustainable tourism strategies.

By understanding the tourists’ motivations and perceptions, stakeholders can manage tourism impacts more effectively, ensuring that tourists’ experiences align with sustainable practices.

This study enriches the understanding of the tourists’ complex interactions with dark heritage sites. It introduces a new angle by examining how motivations, PA and perceptions of tourism impacts influence tourist loyalty, especially in the context of dark tourism.