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This research fills a gap in process science by defining and explaining entropy and the increase of entropy in processes.

This is a theoretical treatment that begins with a conceptual understanding of entropy in thermodynamics and information theory and extends it to the study of degradation and improvement in a transformation process.

A transformation process with three inputs: demand volume, throughput and product design, utilizes a system composed of processors, stores, configuration, human actors, stored data and controllers to provide a product. Elements of the system are aligned with the inputs and each other with a purpose to raise standard of living. Lack of alignment is entropy. Primary causes of increased entropy are changes in inputs and disordering of the system components. Secondary causes result from changes made to cope with the primary causes. Improvement and innovation reduce entropy by providing better alignments and new ways of aligning resources.

This is the first detailed theoretical treatment of entropy in a process science context.

The purpose of this paper is to identify global trends in the third-party logistics (3PL) industry, and with that to find out where the opportunities and challenges lie, what the critical success factors are, and how companies can position themselves well in China. As there is currently very limited knowledge about the 3PL industry in China, this study also intends to shed light in this area.

The study is conducted through focus group interviews with senior executives of leading 3PL companies in China followed by a survey with 70 logistics companies.

The key strengths of the logistics industry in China include numerous factors such as good connectivity and new infrastructure, while its main weaknesses are a shortage of qualified staff and slow adoption of technologies. There are a number of concerns and issues raised, such as lack of qualified staff, oversupply of warehousing space in China, competition from the influx of foreign 3PL companies to China, and regulations on free trade zones, seaports and airports, all of which may have policy implications.

As most of the logistics companies in the study are located and dominating in the Eastern and Southern China, it may be useful to conduct similar study in the new emerging western and central regions of China for comparison.

Managers and investors will appreciate the challenges and opportunities in logistics services in China and have a better insight into Chinese logistics development.

While China has been viewed as a cost effective place for manufacturing, the logistical costs in China are still very high as compared to other developed countries. This research will highlight the key reasons for the high logistical cost in China.

China has been going through a “museum boom” paralleling the domestic tourism boom since 2000; such growth changed the cultural landscape; museums became a vital characteristic of some Chinese cities for both residents and tourists. Encouraged by this growth, the more ambitious “All-for-one Museum (全域博物馆)” was proposed. The physical boundary between museums and living spaces is infinite ambiguity, challenging the idea of museums as “heterotopias.” This study aims to explore the musealization of urban spaces in the context of anthropology and museology, scrutinizing the cultural-political intentions and meanings of these developments, and seeks to ignite further investigation into the reconstruction of historical imaginaries for tourists and urban populations across related disciplines.

This paper examines two cases in Chinese metropolises, Beijing and Shanghai, to illustrate this development of musealization, that is, how the cities actively leverage museological values and methods to connect with their past. In the Beijing case, the authors explore how the local government is leading the effort to musealize the city; in the Shanghai case, they will see how tourists, especially dweller-tourists, navigate through a curated past story in the city and connect their own experience, memory and identity with the place.

The all-for-one museum creates a museal layer projected onto the bigger urban space, even though the authenticity of the “past” is challenged by the modernization development of the city. The authors also find out that for some tourists (especially dweller-tourists), an existential sense of authenticity plays a more significant role as they not only seek to sightsee the past of the city but also to take part in its creation.

This paper discusses two kinds of musealization in cosmopolitan cities of Beijing and Shanghai: top-down and bottom-up. It approaches questions about the musealization of urban spaces from the perspectives of anthropology and museology, and discusses musealization in the specific historical context of China’s modernization process.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between potential affecting factors and the local communities’ willingness to pay (WTP) for housing earthquake insurance (HEI) in the context of ethnic minority communities.

A literature review was done to identify possible factors affecting WTP for HEI. Fieldwork was conducted in 2017 in Dali Minority Autonomous Prefecture, where the first Chinese HEI was launched in 2015. Interviews were done in two earthquake-prone counties, as the main ethnic minority communities in the area. A total of 536 questionnaires were collected and used as empirical data for testing the impacts mechanism.

Respondents’ risk perception, risk exposure, self-prevention behaviors, government aid, insurance experience and sociodemographic characteristics were hypothesized as theoretical indicators correlated to WTP for HEI. Empirical analysis results predict that WTP for HEI is significantly influenced by risk perception, insurance experience, government aid, and age and out-migrating labors. It is evident that higher risk perception and more insurance experience lead to stronger desire for HEI coverage. However, dependency on government aid negatively affects WTP for HEI. Moreover, WTP for HEI is negative in relation to age and out-migrating labors. Surprisingly, ethnic-culture factors were not statistically significant to WTP for HEI.

This paper is an attempt to identify and verify factors affecting WTP for HEI, bridging the gap of inadequate research on WTP for HEI in ethnic minority communities.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the key determinants of the information value of enterprises’ micro-blogs, drawing on the consumer’s perspective. This paper examines the effects of such information value on consumers’ purchase intention through the building of online brand equity. The paper also investigates how perceived usefulness intervenes in the relationship between micro-blog information value and consumer purchase intention.

The proposed research model is examined empirically using a survey of 315 users of the Sina micro-blog. The statistical analysis applies a method based on variance using partial least squares.

The results show that online retailers’ micro-blog posts, which are characterized by informativeness and persuasiveness as perceived by customers, positively impact online retailers’ brand equity, which in turn influences consumer purchase intention. In addition, perceived information usefulness is found to be an important contextual factor that moderates the relationship between perceived persuasiveness and online retailer brand equity.

This work adds significance to the literature by extending the research on micro-blog marketing and also provides practical recommendations for online retailers on the operation of micro-blogs.

With the rapid development of materials informatics and the Semantic Web, the semantic-driven solution has emerged to improve traditional query technology, which is hard to discover implicit knowledge from materials data. However, it is a nontrivial thing for materials scientists to construct a semantic query, and the query results are usually presented in RDF/XML format which is not convenient for users to understand. This paper aims to propose an approach to construct semantic query and visualize the query results for metallic materials domain.

The authors design a query builder to generate SPARQL query statements automatically based on domain ontology and query conditions inputted by users. Moreover, a semantic visualization model is defined based on the materials science tetrahedron to support the visualization of query results in an intuitive, dynamic and interactive way.

Based on the Semantic Web technology, the authors design an automatic semantic query builder to help domain experts write the normative semantic query statements quickly and simply, as well as a prototype (named MatViz) is developed to visually show query results, which could help experts discover implicit knowledge from materials data. Moreover, the experiments demonstrate that the proposed system in this paper can rapidly and effectively return visualized query results over the metallic materials data set.

This paper mainly discusses an approach to support semantic query and visualization of metallic materials data. The implementation of MatViz will be a meaningful work for the research of metal materials data integration.

This study aims to conceptualize the potential stimuli and consequences of perceived yuanfen in the accommodation service encounter by interpreting how Chinese customers perceive yuanfen during their stay in accommodations.

Online accommodation reviews containing yuanfen perception were interpreted using a grounded theory approach. Group interviews were conducted to verify the interpretations.

Positive outcome-generated emotional accommodation experiences (e.g. happiness) can elicit perceived yuanfen, which then evokes customers’ feelings of gratitude, emotional attachment to an accommodation and memorable accommodation experiences. Also, perceived yuanfen facilitates customers’ tolerance of service failures and promotes customers’ intention to stay longer at, recommend and revisit the accommodation.

This study contributes to the literature on accommodation experiences, loyalty, word-of-mouth and service recovery. Future research can explore the interventions that trigger Chinese customers’ perceived yuanfen during accommodation.

This study informs practitioners of the importance of perceived yuanfen in enhancing accommodation experiences and service recovery. Moreover, the conceptualized characteristics and stimuli of perceived yuanfen offer possible guidelines for practitioners on how to stimulate customers’ yuanfen perception.

This study fills the gap of how perceived yuanfen functions in the service encounters in accommodations.

Understandings of house prices and their interrelationships have undoubtedly drawn a great amount of attention from various market participants. This study aims to investigate the monthly newly-built residential house price indices of seventy Chinese cities during a 10-year period spanning January 2011–December 2020 for understandings of issues related to their interdependence and synchronizations.

Analysis here is facilitated through network analysis together with topological and hierarchical characterizations of price comovements.

This study determines eight sectoral groups of cities whose house price indices are directly connected and the price synchronization within each group is higher than that at the national level, although each shows rather idiosyncratic patterns. Degrees of house price comovements are generally lower starting from 2018 at the national level and for the eight sectoral groups. Similarly, this study finds that the synchronization intensity associated with the house price index of each city generally switches to a lower level starting from early 2019.

Results here should be of use to policy design and analysis aiming at housing market evaluations and monitoring.