Search results

This study aims to first explore the extent to which argumentativeness changed during the adaptation process among Muslim immigrants to France from 2006 to 2015 and, second, to examine the cultural fusion process. The study investigates the influence of intercultural contact on communication traits by exploring the extent to which members of the dominant cultural group adapt their argumentativeness over time.

Through a longitudinal panel study, the paper investigates the influence of intercultural contact on communication traits by exploring the extent to which members of the dominant cultural group adapt their argumentativeness over time. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling are used to assess the hypotheses and research question.

Results revealed a curvilinear relationship between argumentativeness and time. Argumentativeness increased from 2006 to 2009, remained constant from 2009 to 2012 and then decreased after 2012. Furthermore, data analysis revealed argumentativeness levels among members of the dominant culture did not change.

The results are potentially limited by the sample being a convenience sample and the presence of extenuating factors.

Argumentativeness is viewed by many researchers as a functional form of communication. However, few studies have longitudinally studied how this trait can change over time.

This paper sought to understand the communication activities of employees who were required to work from home because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors examined the relationship between these individuals' efficient and interrupting communication with their peers in other locations and with individuals who were colocated with them at home. The authors also investigated these workers' job engagement and willingness to speak out about organizational issues.

This paper drew upon a survey of 579 employees via an online panel.

Efficient communication positively predicted employees' job engagement, whereas interruptions negatively predicted job engagement. Additional analyses showed that efficient communication was positively associated with job engagement, which in predicted a higher level of employee voice. Managers showed significantly higher levels of job engagement and voice than nonmanagers.

Recommendations are made for communication managers to cultivate job engagement and to manage interruptions with home-based employees.

Scholars with an interest in job demands and resources have not fully examined how interpersonal communication shapes job engagement and voice scholars have often overlooked teleworkers' communication needs. This study adds depth to the communication management literature in both areas.

Data security breaches are an increasingly common and costly problem for organizations, yet there are critical gaps in our understanding of the role of stakeholder relationship management and crisis communication in relation to data breaches. In fact, though there have been some studies focusing on data breaches, little is known about what might constitute a “typical” response to data breaches whether those responses are effective at maintaining the stakeholders' relationship with the organization, their commitment to use the organization after the crisis, or the reputational threat of the crisis. Further, even less is known about the factors most influencing response and outcome evaluation during data breaches.

We identify a “typical” response strategy to data breaches and then evaluate the role of this response in comparison to situation, stakeholder demographics and relationships between stakeholders, the issue and the organization using an experimental design. This experiment focuses on a 2 (type of organization) × 2 (prior knowledge of breach risk) with a control group design.

Findings suggest that rather than employing reactive crisis response messaging the role of public relations should focus on proactive relationship building between organizations and key stakeholders.

For the last several decades much of the field of crisis communication has assumed that in the context of a crisis the response strategy itself would materially help the organization. These data suggest that the field crisis communication may have been making the wrong assumption. In fact, these data suggest that reactive crisis response has little-to-no effect once we consider the relationships between organizations, the issue and stakeholders. The findings show that an ongoing program of crisis capacity building is to an organization's strategic advantage when data security breaches occur.

Gives a bibliographical review of the finite element meshing and remeshing from the theoretical as well as practical points of view. Topics such as adaptive techniques for meshing and remeshing, parallel processing in the finite element modelling, etc. are also included. The bibliography at the end of this paper contains 1,727 references to papers, conference proceedings and theses/dissertations dealing with presented subjects that were published between 1990 and 2001.

The aim of this paper, which is based on Cheng et al.’s (2012) research, is to re-examines the relationship between a firms’ voluntary disclosure of forward-looking non-financial information (FNFI) and investment efficiency.

The authors chose firms that publicly traded in the Shenzhen and Shanghai stock markets from 2005 to 2011, a total of 926 firms and 6,482 firm-year. To control the endogeneity problem between FNFI and investment efficiency, the authors lagged the FNFI variable for one year.

The authors found that FNFI alleviates a firms’ underinvestment but leads to overinvestment. These effects become gradually weaker over time. In addition, the results indicate that corporate governance helps improve the quality of FNFI, thus boosting investors’ confidence and easing financial constraints.

The limitations of this paper are mainly focused on the measure of FNFI. The authors only considered the quantity of FNFI disclosed by firms and ignored other characteristics of FNFI.

Based on Cheng et al.’s (2012) static findings, this paper considers the dynamic role of FNFI in firms’ investment decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze theory of inventive problem-solving (TRIZ) in terms of knowledge, skill, workload and affect to understand its effectiveness in enabling designers to achieve their optimized mental performance.

TASKS framework, which aims to capture the causal relations among Task workload, affect, skills, knowledge and mental stress, is adopted as our methodology. The framework supports the analysis of how a methodology influence designer’s affect, skills, knowledge and workload. TRIZ-related publications are assessed using the TASKS framework to identify the barriers and enablers in TRIZ-supported design.

TRIZ has limitations on its logic and tools. Nevertheless, it could create a beneficial impact on mental performance of designers.

This paper provides a theory-driven TRIZ usability analysis based on the materials in the literature following the TASKS framework. The impact of TRIZ, as an enabler or a barrier, has been analyzed in accomplishing a design task.

Sustainable development is inseparable from rational and responsible use of resources and promotion of green entrepreneurship. The contemporary green development agenda encompasses climate, economic, technical, social, cultural, and political dimensions. International efforts to greening the global development are conducted by the major economies, including China as the world’s largest consumer of energy and the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. China is aware of its environmental problems, as well as of its part of the overall responsibility for the accomplishment of the sustainable development goals. By means of the decarbonization efforts, the latter are integrated both into the national development agenda (the concept of ecological civilization) and China’s international initiatives (the greening narrative within the Belt and Road Initiative). Over the past decade, China has made a breakthrough on the way to promoting green entrepreneurship and greening of its development (better quality of air and water, renewable energy, electric vehicles, and organic farming). On the other hand, emissions remain high, agricultural land loses productivity, and freshwater resources degrade due to climate change. In conventional industries (oil, coal mining, and electric and thermal energy), decarbonization faces an array of impediments. In this chapter, the authors summarize fundamental provisions of China’s approach to building an ecological civilization and measures to reduce emissions and achieve the carbon neutrality status within the nearest decades. The analysis of obstacles to the decarbonization of the economy and possible prospects for the development of green entrepreneurship summarizes China’s practices for possible use in other countries.

This chapter presents a novel visualisation tool, known as Flexible Integrated Transport Services (FITS) that transport commissioners, providers and administrators could employ to specify and edit the operating constraints as they redesign transport services.

The context of rural transport planning is discussed noting that where resources are fewer, effective co-ordination is required to provide passengers with efficient transport services. An overview of the FITS visualisation tool and its different sub-systems (e.g. general information regarding services, operating area, passenger eligibility, fare structure and surcharge structure) is given. Additionally, some key computational details of the system are discussed. Preliminary results of a sample case study that trialled the FITS tool in a specific test run, using simulated transport to health data in the Morayshire and North-West Aberdeenshire area of Scotland are presented. The concluding discussion considers the potential impact of employing tools like FITS in planning transport services in rural and low-demand settings.

Results from the case study show how these effects could be quantified in terms of changes in costs incurred by transport providers, the level of potential demand that could be covered and the associated revenues (fares and subsidies) which could be generated by providers.

The FITS visualisation tool has the potential to act as a planning tool to help transport commissioners, providers and administrators visualise the effects of shifting operating boundaries of flexible transport services.

By using data on China's security market, this paper aims to examine the relationship between corporate diversification and security analyst following in terms of behavioral decision‐making process.

This is an empirical study.

The results show that the numbers of analysts covering a firm are negatively associated with the firms level of diversification. As the lines of business of firms increase, the cost of analysts' acquiring information will accordingly go up, forcing security analysts to give up following such firms. A further study finds that the firms with related diversification are more likely to be followed by analysts than those with irrelevant diversification, because the related lines that make information and analysis technique generally used could reduce the cost of security analysts.

Extant studies focus too narrowly on statistical properties of the forecasting or market reaction to the analyst reports. However, this paper examines the association between corporate diversification and analysts following by looking at the economic incentives that affect analysts' decisions. Moreover, this paper contributes to the literature on security analysts in China.

Under the high-speed operating conditions, the effects of wheelset elastic deformation on the wheel rail dynamic forces will become more notable compared to the low-speed condition. In order to meet different analysis requirements and selecting appropriate models to analyzing the wheel rail interaction, it is crucial to understand the influence of wheelset flexibility on the wheel-rail dynamics under different speeds and track excitations condition.

The wheel rail contact points solving method and vehicle dynamics equations considering wheelset flexibility in the trajectory body coordinate system were investigated in this paper. As for the wheel-rail contact forces, which is a particular force element in vehicle multibody system, a method for calculating the Jacobian matrix of the wheel-rail contact force is proposed to better couple the wheel-rail contact force calculation with the vehicle dynamics response calculation. Based on the flexible wheelset modeling approach in this paper, two vehicle dynamic models considering the wheelset as both elastic and rigid bodies are established, two kinds of track excitations, namely normal measured track irregularities and short-wave irregularities are used, wheel-rail geometric contact characteristic and wheel-rail contact forces in both time and frequency domains are compared with the two models in order to study the influence of flexible wheelset rotation effect on wheel rail contact force.

Under normal track irregularity excitations, the amplitudes of vertical, longitudinal and lateral forces computed by the flexible wheelset model are smaller than those of the rigid wheelset model, and the virtual penetration and equivalent contact patch are also slightly smaller. For the flexible wheelset model, the wheel rail longitudinal and lateral creepages will also decrease. The higher the vehicle speed, the larger the differences in wheel-rail forces computed by the flexible and rigid wheelset model. Under track short-wave irregularity excitations, the vertical force amplitude computed by the flexible wheelset is also smaller than that of the rigid wheelset. However, unlike the excitation case of measured track irregularity, under short-wave excitations, for the speed within the range of 200 to 350 km/h, the difference in the amplitude of the vertical force between the flexible and rigid wheelset models gradually decreases as the speed increase. This is partly due to the contribution of wheelset’s elastic vibration under short-wave excitations. For low-frequency wheel-rail force analysis problems at speeds of 350 km/h and above, as well as high-frequency wheel-rail interaction analysis problems under various speed conditions, the flexible wheelset model will give results agrees better with the reality.

This study provides reference for the modeling method of the flexible wheelset and the coupling method of wheel-rail contact force to the vehicle multibody dynamics system. Furthermore, by comparative research, the influence of wheelset flexibility and rotation on wheel-rail dynamic behavior are obtained, which is useful to the application scope of rigid and flexible wheelset models.