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This study aims to report the development and experimental evaluation of two kinds of PANI@semiconductor based photocathodic anti-corrosion coating, for application on stainless steel substrates.

PANI was in situ chemical polymerized on TiO₂ and BiVO₄ particles, and FT-IR and SEM/EDS were used to understand the characteristics and elemental distribution of the composite particles. Composite coatings, which consisted of epoxy, PANI@TiO₂ or PANI@BiVO₄ and graphene, were prepared on the 304L stainless steel. Photoelectrochemical response measurement, electrochemical tests and immersion tests were used to assess the anti-corrosion performance of the prepared coatings in 45°C 3.5 wt.% NaCl solution. And the corrosion protection mechanism was further explained by combining with surface observation.

The photoelectrochemical response tests revealed the good photocathodic effect of the coatings, and the reversible oxidation-reduction properties of PANI (pseudocapacitive effect) leading to the repeated usage of the coatings. Consequently, the anti-corrosion mechanism of the composite coating is attributed to the physical barrier effect of the coating, the anodic protection effect of PANI and the photocathodic and energy store effect.

These kind coatings could prevent corrosion from day to night for stainless steel, which has great engineering application prospects on stainless steel corrosion protection.

The purpose of this research is to identify and analyse the perceived risk factors affecting the safety of electric two-wheeler (E2W) riders in urban areas. Given the exponential growth of the global E2W market and the notable challenges offered by E2W vehicles as compared to electric cars, the study aims to propose a managerial framework, to increase the penetration of E2W in the emerging market, as a reliable, and sustainable mobility alternative.

The perceived risk factors of riding E2Ws are relatively scanty, especially in the context of emerging economies. A mixed-method research design is adopted to achieve the research objectives. Four expert groups are interviewed to identify crucial safety risk E2W factors. The grey-Delphi technique is used to confirm the applicability of the extracted risk factors in the Indian context. Next, the Grey-Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) technique is employed to reveal the causal-prominence relationship among the perceived risk factors. The dominance and prominence scores are used to perform Cause and Effect analysis and estimate the triggering risk factors.

The finding of the study suggests that reckless adventurism, adverse road conditions, individual characteristics and distraction caused by using mobile phones, as the topmost triggering risk factors that impact the safety of E2Ws drivers. Similarly, reliability on battery performance low velocity and heavy traffic conditions are found to be some of the critical safety factors.

E2Ws are anticipated to represent the future of sustainable mobility in emerging nations. While they provide convenient and quick transportation for daily urban commutes, certain risk factors are contributing to increased accident rates. This research analyses these risk factors to offer a comprehensive view of driver and rider safety. Unlike conventional measures, it considers subjective quality and reliability parameters, such as battery performance and reckless adventurism. Identifying the most significant causal risk factors helps policymakers focus on the most prominent issues, thereby enhancing the adoption of E2Ws in emerging markets.

We have proposed an integrated framework that uses grey theory with Delphi and DEMATEL to analyse the safety risk factors of driving E2W vehicles considering the uncertainty. In addition, the amalgamation of Delphi and DEMATEL helps not only to identify the pertinent safety risk factors, but also bifurcate them into cause-and-effect groups considering the mutual relationship between them. The framework will enable practitioners and policymakers to design preventive strategies to minimize risk and boost the penetration of E2Ws in an emerging country, like India.

This systematic review of the current gender inequality issues in operations and supply chain management (OSCM) seeks to illuminate the multifaceted aspects of this issue and their various implications for the field.

Employing systematic literature review and Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Literature Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) methodologies, this research delves into an analysis of 238 journal articles spanning a 47-year period. The objective is to discern existing voids and put forth actionable suggestions that align with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal Number 5 (SDG5) in the context of men and women, which pertains to realizing gender equality and empowering girls and women.

The results show a significant increase in published articles over the period. However, only five literature review articles were found that specifically address gender inequality in OSCM. The five common themes impacting gender inequality in this field are gender issues, mindset, transportation disparities, human resources and gender roles in OSCM, alongside sustainability, mobility and government policy intersections. The paper emphasizes the need for further research on these themes. It also suggests implications for educators, researchers, companies, OSCM departments and policymakers to achieve SDG5.

This study offers valuable insights by comprehensively reviewing and systematically analyzing the prevailing gender inequality issues within OSCM. It accentuates the significance of gender equality in OSCM, augmenting the burgeoning discourse and catalyzing concerted endeavors for gender equality.

Online health communities (OHC) can transform the healthcare industry, particularly in developing economies. Technology advancement and increased health literacy pave the way for these communities to become powerful tools for empowering patients. The purpose of this study was to empirically validate the linkages between social support and how it overarchingly influences patient compliance. Following social support theory, this study delineates how support from the community affects the patient–physician relationship (PERP) and consequently patient compliance regarding the treatment plan. This study also invents the role of patient trust in an OHC in moderating the relationship between PERP and engagement.

This paper is based on social support and empowerment theories to investigate the importance of social support in improving patients’ health behaviours and health outcomes via patient empowerment, patient engagement and patient compliance. The authors surveyed users from three Facebook cancer communities in India to collect data. The authors used partial least squares structured equation modelling and necessary condition analysis (NCA) with 265 participants to support the proposed model.

The result demonstrates that PERP is a crucial factor for patient engagement in OHC, and patient engagement has a significant effect on patient compliance. The results also showed that trust was a significant moderator between PERP and engagement. The NCA analysis shows all the relationships are significant; however, emotional support is not a necessary condition for PERP.

By empowering cancer patients and enabling them to meet their emotional and informational needs through OHCs, the study model can aid in the development of solutions that will improve compliance with their treatment in an emerging economic context. The findings indicate the potential chain reaction of social support and PERP in online cancer health communities. This study also contributes to quantifying the social impacts of online healthcare services and how to enhance the healthcare compliance framework.

This study combines social support and empowerment theory with patient, physician, and technology to provide a fine-grained picture of PERP in OHC. It explains how social support in OHC promotes self-care behaviour. This linkage validation enables readers and the community at large to gain a more nuanced understanding of how social support – through PERP, engagement and trust – enables patient compliance using primary data.

When handling small-sized shafts and holes, achieving optimal safety, size compatibility and shape adaptability using rigid grippers presents significant problems. Recent advancements have introduced soft end-effectors that offer enhanced safety and adaptability for gripping parts. However, these soft end-effectors often struggle to maintain the necessary gripping positional accuracy. The purpose of this paper is to design a soft end-effector specifically engineered to address these problems, combining precise gripping capabilities with improved safety, positional accuracy and adaptability to the size and shape of fragile, small-sized components.

A soft finger with multilayer decreasing drive air chambers is designed to achieve the finger bending increasing from the root to the tip of the finger to improve the flexibility of the fingertip. Additionally, a three-finger self-centering configuration is employed, coupled with an expandable structure to increase the gripping range. Furthermore, a theoretical mathematical model of the finger is established. The physical prototype is manufactured and subjected to experimental testing, including gripping tests on small-sized, fragile shaft holes, to validate its operational performance.

The grasping experiments confirm that the designed end-effector can maintain coaxial positioning and meet adaptability requirements when handling fragile components with small-sized shaft holes. Furthermore, the addition of expanding palm structure increases the gripping attitude and enriches the application scene and gripping space.

The design of multilayer decreasing air chamber structure to solve the problem of poor gripping stability and low positional accuracy of soft manipulator; the expandable palm design is introduced to enhance gripping space; and solved the problem of gripping accuracy in the assembly of fragile parts with small-size shafts and holes.

The study seeks to unpack the effect of distributed leadership on teacher professionalism, and the mediating roles of collaborative learning and relational trust in the Chinese cultural context.

The proposed framework was examined based on the questionnaire data from 522 primary and secondary school teachers in China using structural equation modeling.

It was found that distributed leadership had a direct positive impact on collaborative learning and relational trust, which also exerted the direct positive impact on teacher professionalism. However, distributed leadership cannot directly affect teacher professionalism in China. Only through the full mediation of collaborative learning and relational trust, could distributed leadership facilitate teacher professionalism in an indirect way. The proportion of sequence mediating effect was the highest, followed by the single mediating role played by relational trust.

We have demonstrated to international scholars the indirect value of distributed leadership in enhancing teacher professionalism in China. The results not only enrich the existing influencing mechanism framework of professionalism, but also provide valuable implications that school leadership does not have a completely positive effect on teacher professionalism. Only when the empowering leadership style is truly perceived by teachers and strengthens their collaborative learning and mutual trust, can a team of capable educators be formed to promote teacher professionalism. It also indicates that teacher professionalism becomes a systematic and structural process requiring support from multiple parties, such as schools, leaders, colleagues and self.

Charitable giving in China has moved from being subjected to government attention and public skepticism to receiving government encouragement and public support. The role played by political connections in philanthropy is indisputable, although very few studies have explored their association from the perspective of the country’s first Charity Law of 2016. This study aims to contribute to the ongoing debate about the 2016 Charity Law and offers an understanding of the future trends in corporate charitable giving.

Using empirical analysis of data collected from listed companies in China, this study analyzes the impact of political connections on corporate charitable giving before and after the 2016 Charity Law. The study adopts three leading theories from previous research into corporate charitable giving and political connections: corporate social responsibility, resource dependence theory and stakeholder theory. A conceptual framework is outlined, and hypotheses are formulated accordingly.

The results show that political connections have a substantial positive impact on corporate charitable giving, both before and after the implementation of the 2016 Charity Law, which has significantly promoted and increased the amount and proportion of charitable giving. Although the 2016 Charity Law attempted to weaken the political connections of enterprises, the influence of political connections on corporate charitable giving has proved difficult to diminish or eliminate, as charity is dominated by the state.

This study explores the association between political connections and corporate charitable giving from the perspective of China’s Charity Law of 2016.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical historical analysis of the business (mis)behaviors and influencing factors that discourage enduring cooperation between principals and agents, to introduce strategies that embrace the social values, economic motivation and institutional designs historically adopted to curtail dishonest acts in international business and to inform an improved principal–agent theory that reflects principal–agent reciprocity as shaped by social, political, cultural, economic, strategic and ideological forces

The critical historical research method is used to analyze Chinese compradors and the foreign companies they served in pre-1949 China.

Business practitioners can extend orthodox principal–agent theory by scrutinizing the complex interactions between local agents and foreign companies. Instead of agents pursuing their economic interests exclusively, as posited by principal–agent theory, they also may pursue principal-shared interests (as suggested by stewardship theory) because of social norms and cultural values that can affect business-related choices and the social bonds built between principals and agents.

The behaviors of compradors and foreign companies in pre-1949 China suggest international business practices for shaping social bonds between principals and agents and foreign principals’ creative efforts to enhance shared interests with local agents.

Understanding principal–agent theory’s limitations can help international management scholars and practitioners mitigate transaction partners’ dishonest acts.

A critical historical analysis of intermediary businesspeople’s (mis)behavior in pre-1949 (1840–1949) China can inform the generalizability of principal–agent theory and contemporary business strategies for minimizing agents’ dishonest acts.

This paper analyzes the application of digital twin technology in the field of intelligent operation and maintenance of high-speed railway infrastructure from the perspective of top-level design.

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the definition, connotations, characteristics and key technologies of digital twin technology. It also conducts a thorough analysis of the current state of digital twin applications, with a particular focus on the overall requirements for intelligent operation and maintenance of high-speed railway infrastructure. Using the Jinan Yellow River Bridge on the Beijing–Shanghai high-speed railway as a case study, the paper details the construction process of the twin system from the perspectives of system architecture, theoretical definition, model construction and platform design.

Digital twin technology can play an important role in the whole life cycle management, fault prediction and condition monitoring in the field of high-speed rail operation and maintenance. Digital twin technology is of great significance to improve the intelligent level of high-speed railway operation and management.

This paper systematically summarizes the main components of digital twin railway. The general framework of the digital twin bridge is given, and its application in the field of intelligent operation and maintenance is prospected.

Integrating balance theory and social identify theory, this paper proposes a multilevel model to explain how abusive supervision climate of team impacts the relationship among team members as well as subordinates’ behavior towards their teammates, especially organizational citizenship behavior (OCB).

A survey was conducted to collect two-wave and multi-source data from 398 employees nested in 106 teams from Chinese high-technology companies. Hierarchical linear modeling was conducted to examine the theoretical model.

The results indicate that there is an inverted U-shape association between abusive supervision climate and subordinates’ OCB towards coworker; team member exchange (TMX) mediates their inverted U-shaped link. Furthermore, we confirm that coworker support plays a vitally moderating role upon the curvilinear link of abusive supervision climate (ASC)–TMX; specifically, when employees perceive low coworker support, negative relations between ASC and TMX will be stronger.

This study identifies team members’ advantageous and adverse relational response to shared threat of ASC and examines coworker support as a moderator of ASC, which provides valuable insights into when and why employees tend to cooperate with their teammates to jointly confront their leader’s abuse and highlights the importance of coworkers, thus enabling organizations to deeply understand the wider influences of ASC on interpersonal relationship between team members.