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The purpose of this paper is to reveal generic skills improvement from participation in overseas working programs using Taiwanese young adults taking an Australian working holiday program as an example.

In this study, respondents needed to be those who had participated in an Australian working holiday program and had stayed in Australia for at least six months so that their experiences would be extensive enough to enable answering questions in the questionnaire. There were a total of 122 respondents. After eliminating incomplete observations, there were a total of 95 valid observations.

The average number of jobs held per person was 2.77, and farm and factory jobs seemed to be popular. Thinking skills and learning skills were significantly improved, especially for highly motivated respondents. An unfamiliar working environment in foreign countries reinforces personal characteristics. Students who participate in overseas working programs need to interact with local people to improve communication skills, especially for those who are less motivated. Although the natural environment is the main attraction for students who participate in overseas working programs, improvement in generic skills is actually the core factor for students to benefit from the experiences.

The results of this study would be useful for working holiday participants to understand what they can expect to experience in improving generic skills and further to form a baseline for future studies as well as guidelines for promoting Australian working holiday programs.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal influential information used in vegetable purchasing decisions of household primary food shoppers in China and in Taiwan.

Two in-person surveys were administrated separately in Shanghai, China and in Taipei, Taiwan, the two most populous metropolitan areas in China and in Taiwan, respectively.

Results reveal that about 32 per cent of respondents in Taipei purchase vegetables once in every two to three days. The majority of respondents in Shanghai (81 per cent) purchase vegetables on a daily basis. Results of factor analysis reveal the four dimensions, origin labelling, promotion, selection, and quality, influence purchasing decisions of respondents in Taipei and in Shanghai. For household primary food shoppers in Taipei, origin labelling and selection help food shoppers in Taipei in vegetable purchasing decisions, but not promotion. For those food shoppers in Shanghai who purchase large volume of vegetables, quality is the most important factor in purchasing decisions.

This study provides new insights into vegetable purchasing decisions in two populous cities in China and Taiwan. The contributions of this study are to provide valuable information in vegetable purchasing decisions for effective information communication in retailing; and to fill in the gap of research in vegetable purchasing decisions in consumer behaviour studies in Chinese societies.

The rapid, yet low-profit, expansion of the production capacity of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) represents a remarkable phenomenon. However, the motivation behind this key operational decision remains underexplored, especially concerning the prioritization of sociopolitical and financial goals in operations management. Drawing on the multiple-goal model in the behavioral theory of the firm (BTOF), the authors' study aims to examine how SOE capacity expansion is driven by performance feedback regarding the sociopolitical goal of employment provision and how SOEs differently prioritize sociopolitical and financial goals based on negative versus positive feedback on the sociopolitical goal.

The authors' study uses panel data on 826 Chinese SOEs in manufacturing industries from 2011 to 2019. The authors employ the fixed-effects model with Driscoll–Kraay standard errors, which are robust to heteroscedasticity, autocorrelation and cross-sectional dependence.

The authors find that SOEs increase capacity expansion as sociopolitical feedback becomes more negative, but they may not increase capacity expansion in response to positive sociopolitical feedback. Moreover, negative profitability feedback strengthens SOEs' capacity expansion in response to negative sociopolitical feedback. In contrast, negative profitability feedback weakens their response to positive sociopolitical feedback.

The authors' study offers a novel behavioral explanation of SOEs' operational decisions regarding capacity expansion. While the literature has traditionally assumed multiple goals as either hierarchical or compatible, the authors extend the BTOF's multiple-goal model to illuminate when firms pursue sociopolitical and financial goals as compatible (i.e. the activation rule) versus hierarchical (i.e. the sequential rule), thereby reconciling their tension in distinct performance situations. Practically, the authors provide fine-grained insights into how operations managers can prioritize multiple goals when making operational decisions. The authors' study also shows how policymakers can influence SOE operations to pursue sociopolitical goals for public benefit.

The increasing frequency and intensity of the extreme weather events could cause devastating consequences in tourism. Climate change–related extreme weather events and their relation to tourism is an emerging field for education and research. The purpose of this study is to categorize the impact of climate change on tourist destinations with regard to extreme weather-related risks in outdoor recreation and tourism. Managerial implications for policymakers and stakeholders are discussed.

To outline the risks from climate change associated with tourism, this study uses the Prisma analysis for identification, screening, checking for eligibility and finding relevant literature for further categorization.

Based on a thoroughly examination of relevant literature, risks and threats posed by climate change could be categorized into following four areas: reduced experiential value in outdoor winter recreation; reduced value in beach scenery and comfort; land degradation and reduced biodiversity; and reduced value in personal safety and comfort in tourism. It also focuses on the significance of using big data applications in catastrophic disaster management and risk reduction. Recommendations with technology and data analytics to continuously improve the disaster management process in tourism education are provided based on findings of this study.

Primary contributions of this study include the following: providing a summarized overview of the risks associated with climate change in terms of tourist experiential value for educational implications; and revealing the role of data analytics in disaster management in the context of tourism and climate change for tourism education.

The purpose of this paper is to examine factors influencing environmental behaviour of the general public and to develop educational implications that will enhance effectiveness in information dissemination for environmental sustainability in Taiwan.

A survey using personal interviews was administered in Taipei, Taichung and Kaohsiung metropolitan areas following stratified sampling method based on age and gender distributions of the population between the ages of 18 and 59 in Taiwan. Total valid samples were 481. Probit model was applied to examine factors influencing environmental behaviour.

Based on findings in the study, environmental knowledge, pro-environmental attitude (emphasising balance of nature), altruism and habitual behaviour positively influence environmental behaviour. Humancentric (emphasising human domination) negatively influence environmental behaviour. The following educational implications are capable to enlarge a spectrum of environmental behaviour in Taiwan: including topics of waste avoidance and reduction in chemical usage for cleaning or for insecticides in lessons/curricula; and promote general public to live a life which causes fewer burdens on the environment.

Environmental education plays fundamental role in educating the public with concurrent environmental knowledge, in an expectation that the general public would take the information into consideration and modify behaviour in an effort to sustain the environment. Research implications of this study are: environmental behaviour is multidimensional and can be examined using a comprehensive set of statements including domains of energy conservation, mobility and transportation, waste avoidance, consumerism and recycling; and habitual behaviour is an influencing factor to explain environmental behaviour and can be examined thoroughly in future studies.

The study provides insights into environmental education based on examining factors influencing environmental behaviour. It advances the field by exploring environmental behaviour in five domains and revealing habitual behaviour as an influential factor. This allows educators to comprehend gaps in environmental behaviour and the needs for environmental education in Taiwan.

This study focuses on home country institutions as sources of variation in the level of foreign investment into India. Our findings support the idea that institutional voids found in India are less of a deterrent to investments from home countries with high levels of institutional development than from home countries with similar institutional voids. Overall, foreign investments in India are found to be significantly related to the strength of institutions within home countries. The levels of both approved and realized foreign direct investment (FDI) are strongly influenced by economic factors and home country regulative institutions, and weakly influenced by home country cognitive institutions. When considered separately, the cognitive institutions and regulative institutions within a given home country each significantly influence the level of approved/realized FDI into India. However, when considered jointly, only the strength of regulative institutions is predictive of FDI inflows.

This paper explores the potential competitive advantages from the development of an internal network of subsidiaries and external network of alliances. Given the broad scope and lack of systematic investigation in prior research, clinical field research was conducted in eleven Japanese subsidiaries in China. Our in‐depth interviews revealed that there are benefits and costs associated with the development of both subsidiary networks and alliance networks. While there are exploitation and exploration benefits from subsidiary network development, internationalizing firms (especially smaller firms) are subject to the liability of foreignness. Alliance network development is an effective way to mitigate this liability if internationalizing firms choose the right alliance strategy.

Artificial neural networks (ANN) are appearing as alternatives to traditional statistical modeling techniques in many scientific disciplines. However, the inherent drawbacks of neural networks such as topology specification, undue training expense, local minima and training unpredictability will overlay their merits in engineering applications, especially. In this paper, adaptive radial basis function (ARBF) network and improved support vector machine (SVM) are presented in atmospheric sciences. The principle component analysis (PCA) technique is employed to the ARBF network as well, namely, ARBF/PCA network for the convenience of expression and comparison, so as to fasten the learning process. Comparing with traditional neural network models, the proposed models can automatically determine the size of network and parameters, fasten the learning process and achieve good generalization performances in prediction of pollutant level. The simulation results based on a real‐world data set demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed methods.

This paper aims to examine how consumers perceive incomplete information in print apparel advertisements in magazines and whether incomplete information influences decisions.

A total of 239 examples of print apparel advertisements in fashion magazines were collected in 2006. Content analysis was utilised to code the types of information in print apparel advertisements prior to the design of the questionnaire in the consumer survey. In the questionnaire, attitudes toward incomplete information in print apparel advertisements, information search, involvement, purchasing intentions, and demographics were included. A consumer survey was administered in Taiwan using stratified sampling. The total number of completed, usable questionnaires returned was 304.

Consumers who thought missing information in print apparel advertising to be important tended to find missing information from other sources like media, word‐of‐mouth, salespersons, and in stores. Information search behaviour positively influenced purchasing intentions. Consumers with higher levels of involvement tended to pay more attention to missing information and were more likely to search information.

Print apparel advertisements are presented not only in magazines, but on outdoor billboards, in catalogues, on the internet, in newspapers, and in buses. The restrictions of readers of fashion magazines as respondents in the study could limit the applicability of research findings of the study to attitudes toward incomplete information in print apparel advertisements of fashion magazine readers.

Print apparel advertisements are not a major source for consumers to obtain comprehensive fashion information. Simplified but clear design of print apparel advertising is acceptable for consumers who are prone to ignore missing information. Those who tend to notice missing information in print apparel advertisements would investigate other sources to obtain information for purchase decisions. Print apparel advertisements showing fashion clothing and brand names only are easy for browsing. The attractiveness of print apparel advertising design seems to be more important than detailed information included in advertisements.

The contribution of the study is to reveal attitudes toward incomplete information in print apparel advertising. The results of the study could be beneficial for apparel advertisers and could be valuable for marketers to realise the types of information consumers prefer while searching though the medium of fashion magazines.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how globalised business programmes in higher education in Taiwan fills latent gaps between business education and the local job markets from viewpoints of teachers, students in higher education, and those working in the job markets within five years of graduation. The distinction in viewpoints from teachers, students, and graduates is valuable in examining how globalised business programmes in Taiwan help students in competitiveness in the local job markets.

Six teachers (five males, one female) in business programmes from two national universities with teaching experiences ranging from 2 to 19 years were interviewed. Ten students (four males, six females) in business programmes from six universities ranging from junior to master’s level were interviewed. Nine people (five males, four females) who were working full-time in the local job markets within five years of graduation from business programmes were interviewed. A total of 25 subjects (14 males, 11 females) participated in the study.

In course-related issues, students seem to have difficulties in understanding certain issues with different cultural background, and this affects teachers using textbooks and cases with USA or European standpoints. In applicability, some teachers believe it is students’ responsibilities to know how to apply what they have learned in school in practice. Those graduates who are working in local markets explained that in reality they do not apply much of what they have learned in globalised business programmes at work. In crossing over the gap, some teachers try to include local cases in teaching materials.

The argument in this study is not to lose the beauty of localisation in globalisation in business programmes in higher education. The latent gaps between globalised business programmes and local job markets can be crossed over with a strong foundation of training in theories in globalised business programmes plus some experiences obtained in working experiences.

Findings in this study provided new insights into gaps between globalised business programmes and local job markets, and how it can be crossed over with a strong foundation of training in theories plus experiences obtained in practical training. Generic competence and transferable skills in local business operations ought to be included in globalised business programmes.