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This paper takes the Shanghai-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect as a quasi-natural experiment and investigates the impact of capital market liberalization on the corporate debt maturity structure. It also aims to provide some policy implications for corporate debt financing and further liberalization of the capital market in China.

Employing the exogenous event of Shanghai-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect and using the data of Chinese A-share firms from 2010 to 2020, this study constructs a difference-in-differences model to examine the relationship between capital market liberalization and corporate debt maturity structure. To validate the results, this study performed several robustness tests, including the parallel test, the placebo test, the Heckman two-stage regression and the propensity score matching.

This paper finds that capital market liberalization has significantly increased the proportion of long-term debt of target firms. Further analyses suggest that the impact of capital market liberalization on the debt maturity structure is more pronounced for firms with lower management ownership and non-Big 4 audit. Channel tests show that capital market liberalization improves firms’ information environment and curbs self-interested management behavior.

This research provides empirical evidence for the consequences of capital market liberalization and enriches the literature on the determinants of corporate debt maturity structure. Further this study makes a reference for regulators and financial institutions to improve corporate financing through the governance role of capital market liberalization.

With increasing advances in emerging technologies including the metaverse and a continued rise in Muslim-friendly tourism, hospitality providers need to understand the opportunities and challenges involved in capitalizing on the metaverse phenomenon to design new service environments or servicescapes for their Muslim customers. This paper aims to develop a conceptual model of a servicescape in the metaverse that caters to the needs of Muslims and to advance a research agenda in this field.

The main methodology for this conceptual study is a multidisciplinary literature review. Accordingly, this study synthesized relevant literature on service environments and halal markets from the services marketing, Islamic marketing and computer science fields to advance a logical framework built on seminal servicescape models and the Stimulus-Organism-Response framework.

This paper provides several contributions. First, this study identifies the experienscape as a suitable foundational servicescape model for halal markets in the metaverse. Second, the authors introduce the “5 Ps halal metaverse component,” which elaborates on the associated opportunities and challenges in catering to the needs of Muslim metaverse travelers. Third, this study develops the halal metaverse servicescape model, which factors the relevant media metaverse components. Finally, the authors propose key managerial implications around four strategic areas and provide a comprehensive research agenda in the concluding section.

Given the conceptual nature of this study, further empirical research is required to ascertain the variables and key relationships proposed in the conceptual model.

The findings of this study highlight the multi-stakeholder and multidisciplinary approaches needed to create a metaverse for halal markets. In addition, the insights help developers and managers to better understand the implications of the metaverse for halal markets and provide them with strategic considerations to better design service landscapes for Muslims in the metaverse.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first conceptual paper that develops a servicescape model in the metaverse in the context of Muslim consumers and comprehensively discusses its challenges and opportunities, thereby advancing the literature on servicescapes for the metaverse as well as service environments optimized for Muslim markets.

This study aims to identify a value co-creation framework for live streaming through tourism scenes (LStTS). It also clarifies the value attributes of LStTS and makes an empirical test.

The study used a mixed-method approach. In Study 1, a total of 12,216 pieces of viewers’ comments and ten web news reports were coded and analyzed employing a grounded theory approach. In Study 2, data were collected from 587 Douyin e-commerce users. Exploratory factor analysis and partial least squares structural equation modeling were used to test the value co-creation framework of LStTS.

In Study 1, six value attributes in three categories were identified based on a content analysis of viewers’ comments. In Study 2, a three-order factorial model of value co-creation in LStTS was identified and tested.

Our study is limited by the preponderance of female respondents in the sample and the unique nature of the research context.

Merchants and streamers should consider whether there is a fit between the merchandise and the tourism scene when selecting the tourism scene for live streaming marketing; they can select novel and beautiful natural tourism scenes to attract viewers. Detailed and comprehensive product information should be provided in the process of live streaming marketing and sharing with consumers.

The novelty of our study lies in the provision of a new value co-creation framework in LStTS, which offers a theoretical basis for analyzing the value of the tourism scene in live streaming marketing.

Kerala reported the first COVID-19 case on January 30. In order to stop the disease's spread in a heavily populated nation like India, the government declared a lockdown on 25 March 2020. Unexpected lockout caused wages for workers in the unorganised sector to stagnate, which led to reverse migration in India. During the first round of lockdowns organised by COVID-19, 43.3 million interstate migrants working in the informal manufacturing sector actually went back to their homes. This background encourages us to investigate how the COVID-19 epidemic affected male labour employment, with a primary focus on the unorganised manufacturing sector. The study takes into account the employment situation of male CWS in rural, urban and overall India. To investigate the aforementioned objectives, Poirier's Spline function approach has been used in the study. Relying on secondary data aggregated from ‘The Periodic Labour Force Survey’, Annual Report (2018–2019), (2019–2020), (2020–2021), the research comes to the conclusion that the work scenario for male CWS is more negatively impacted by pandemic in urban than rural areas. The paper ends with appropriate policy recommendations.

In smart cities striving for innovation, development, and prosperity, hydrogen offers a promising path for decarbonization. However, its effective integration into the evolving energy landscape requires understanding regional intricacies and identifying areas for improvement. This chapter examines hydrogen transport from production to utilization, evaluating technologies’ pros, cons, and process equations and using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) as a Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) tool to assess these technologies based on multiple criteria. It also explores barriers and opportunities in hydrogen transport within the 21st-century energy transition, providing insights for overcoming challenges. Evaluation criteria for hydrogen transport technologies were ranked by relative importance, with energy efficiency topping the list, followed by energy density, infrastructure requirements, cost, range, and flexibility. Safety, technological maturity, scalability, and compatibility with existing infrastructure received lower weights. Hydrogen transport technologies were categorized into three performance levels: low, medium, and high. Hydrogen tube trailers ranked lowest, while chemical hydrides, hydrail, liquid organic hydrogen carriers, hydrogen pipelines, and hydrogen blending exhibited moderate performance. Compressed hydrogen gas, liquid hydrogen, ammonia carriers, and hydrogen fueling stations demonstrated the highest performance. The proposed framework is crucial for next-gen smart cities, cutting emissions, boosting growth, and speeding up development with a strong hydrogen infrastructure. This makes the region a sustainable tech leader, improving air quality and well-being. Aligned with Gulf Region goals, it is key for smart cities. Policymakers, industries, and researchers can use these insights to overcome barriers and seize hydrogen transport tech opportunities.

This opening chapter introduces key debates in relation to informality in policymaking, laying the theoretical and conceptual groundwork for the individual empirical chapters, beginning with a provocation for how informality can alternatively be understood. Through illustrating where gaps in understanding within current literature exist for how informality acquires meaning, and the physical and material relevance for how it manifests across contexts, this chapter introduces the three thematic clusters that thread through the book’s chapters: boundaries, knowledge mastery and networks. In doing so, it briefly positions each chapter in relation to these flexible and overlapping categories, drawing attention to how each chapter presents a different understanding of informality. Key to this chapter is our contention that while informality escapes definition, without binary or fixed conceptualisations of this concept we are better able to take in its fluidity and envisage how it is interwoven in everyday policy work and its human and non-human enactment. Underpinning this contention is a key contribution of this work, a proposition for a re-conceptualising of informality and formality as in|formality. Methodologically, this chapter argues that informality is better ‘shown’ than ‘told’ – and that this can be achieved through interpretive and socio-material approaches woven through disciplines that foreground narrative, ethnographic and creative approaches to research.

Based on affective events theory, this research attempted to investigate how negative gossip about organizational change drives employees to experience negative emotions and direct their aggression toward customers.

We conducted a scenario-based experiment (Study 1) and a multiwave field survey (Study 2) to test our hypotheses.

The results show that (1) negative emotions mediate the relationship between change-related negative gossip and displaced aggression toward customers; (2) perceived organizational constraints strengthen the relationship between change-related negative gossip and negative emotions; (3) future work self-salience weakens the relationship between change-related negative gossip and negative emotions; and (4) change-related negative gossip has a strengthened (weakened) indirect effect on displaced aggression via negative emotions when employees have high perceived organizational constraints (future work self-salience).

The study expands research on organizational change and displaced aggression and provides practical implications for managing organizational change.

The extensive brand associations research lacks organisation when it comes to the used information cues. This paper aims to systematically map and categorise the brand knowledge associations’ components and develop a typology applicable to any brand.

Using the restaurant and hotel industries in four different European cultural clusters as contexts, this work uses well-established systematic qualitative analysis approaches to categorise, code and model pictorial content in two studies. A four-stage sampling process identified Instagram brand-posted signals (photos), 243 from 26 restaurants in Madrid, Paris and Rome for study one and 390 from 29 hotels in Moscow, Berlin and Stockholm for study two. Adhering to relevant guidelines, the manual coding procedures progressed from 246 for restaurants and 231 for hotels initially generated free information coding inductive codes to a theory-informed categorisation. Quantitative analysis complemented the qualitative analysis, revealing the information cues relative utilisation.

For both studies, the analysis produced a typology consisting of two high-level and five lower-level brand knowledge association categories, namely: (a) brand characteristics consisting of the brand as a symbol, the brand as a product and the brand as a person, and (b) brand imagery consisting of user imagery and experience imagery. The five lower-level categories comprise of sub-categories and dimensions, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the brand associations conceptual structure relevant to brands operating in any industry.

Researchers can use this typology to holistically encapsulate brand associations or design projects aiming to deepen brand knowledge association aspects/dimensions understanding.

Managers can use this typology to portray brands. Some of the identified lower-level categories and/or sub-categories and dimensions are likely to need customisation to fit specific contexts.

The suggested categorisation offers a solid, comprehensive framework for effectively categorising and coding brand knowledge associations and proposes a new theory in the form of a typology.

This study aims to explore how to overcome and address the loss of exploratory innovation, thereby achieving greater success in exploratory innovation. This phenomenon of loss occurs when enterprises decrease their investment in and engagement with exploratory innovation, ultimately leading to an insufficient amount of such innovation efforts. Drawing on dynamic capabilities, this study investigates the relationship between organizational foresight and exploratory innovation and examines the moderating role of breakthrough orientation/financial orientation.

This study used survey data collected from 296 Chinese high-tech companies in multiple industries and sectors.

The evidence produced by this study reveals that three elements of organizational foresight (i.e. environmental scanning capabilities, strategic selection capabilities and integrating capabilities) positively influence exploratory innovation. Furthermore, this positive effect is strengthened in the context of a high-breakthrough orientation. Moreover, the relationships among environmental scanning capabilities, strategic selection capabilities and exploratory innovation become weaker as an enterprise’s financial orientation increases, whereas a strong financial orientation does not affect the relationship between integrating capabilities and exploratory innovation.

Ambidexterity is key to successful enterprise innovation. Compared with exploitative innovation, it is by no means easy to engage in exploratory innovation, which is especially important in high-tech companies. While the loss of exploratory innovation has been observed, few empirical studies have explored ways to promote exploratory innovation more effectively. A key research implication of this study pertains to the role of organizational foresight in the improvement of exploratory innovation in the context of high-tech companies.

This paper contributes to the broader literature on exploratory innovation and organizational foresight and provides practical guidance for high-tech companies regarding ways of avoiding the loss of exploratory innovation and becoming more successful at exploratory innovation.