Search results

This study investigates the impact of Chinese senior leaders’ diplomatic visits on outward and inward foreign direct investment (OFDI and IFDI, respectively). Additionally, it aims to discern the differential impacts of diplomatic visits on FDI across different Chinese administrations.

We utilize data about the diplomatic visits of Chinese senior leaders to 146 host countries. The dataset was divided into two leadership eras: the tenure of President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao from 2003 to 2012 and the period from 2013 to 2021 under President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Li Keqiang. We employ generalized least squares, lagged effect, and two-stage least squares methods to estimate the econometric model. This analytical framework assesses the influence of high-level diplomatic visits on FDI flows, addressing potential time-serial and endogeneity concerns.

The findings reveal that senior leaders’ diplomatic visits significantly boost Chinese OFDI. The effect on IFDI in China is not statistically significant. The administrations of Hu and Xi played positive roles in promoting OFDI. However, only Hu’s administration showed a statistically significant positive relationship with IFDI. The result suggests a potential increase in IFDI between China and host countries within two to three years following diplomatic visits.

This study contributes to the understanding of how Chinese senior leaders’ diplomatic activities affect foreign direct investment. It provides a deeper understanding of Chinese senior leaders’ diplomatic efforts to compensate for investment across two administration periods. It offers insights into the potential influence of diplomatic efforts on FDI, enriching the understanding of diplomacy’s role in international business contexts.

This study aims to review the recent advancements in high entropy alloys (HEAs) called high entropy materials, including high entropy superalloys which are current potential alternatives to nickel superalloys for gas turbine applications. Understandings of the laser surface modification techniques of the HEA are discussed whilst future recommendations and remedies to manufacturing challenges via laser are outlined.

Materials used for high-pressure gas turbine engine applications must be able to withstand severe environmentally induced degradation, mechanical, thermal loads and general extreme conditions caused by hot corrosive gases, high-temperature oxidation and stress. Over the years, Nickel-based superalloys with elevated temperature rupture and creep resistance, excellent lifetime expectancy and solution strengthening L12 and γ´ precipitate used for turbine engine applications. However, the superalloy’s density, low creep strength, poor thermal conductivity, difficulty in machining and low fatigue resistance demands the innovation of new advanced materials.

HEAs is one of the most frequently investigated advanced materials, attributed to their configurational complexity and properties reported to exceed conventional materials. Thus, owing to their characteristic feature of the high entropy effect, several other materials have emerged to become potential solutions for several functional and structural applications in the aerospace industry. In a previous study, research contributions show that defects are associated with conventional manufacturing processes of HEAs; therefore, this study investigates new advances in the laser-based manufacturing and surface modification techniques of HEA.

The AlxCoCrCuFeNi HEA system, particularly the Al0.5CoCrCuFeNi HEA has been extensively studied, attributed to its mechanical and physical properties exceeding that of pure metals for aerospace turbine engine applications and the advances in the fabrication and surface modification processes of the alloy was outlined to show the latest developments focusing only on laser-based manufacturing processing due to its many advantages.

It is evident that high entropy materials are a potential innovative alternative to conventional superalloys for turbine engine applications via laser additive manufacturing.

This chapter contributes to the ongoing debate about how digitalisation affects the internationalisation of small- and medium-sized firms (SMEs). By applying the Uppsala Internationalisation Process model, this chapter examines the impact of e-commerce on the internationalisation of SMEs. The study uses a unique dataset, which includes 14,513 SMEs across several sectors in 34 countries. The results show that firms using the Internet as a means to provide information about the firm exhibit a higher degree of internationalisation, while using the Internet to facilitate transactions was found to have a positive impact on the ratio of foreign sales to the total sales; however, these foreign sales are likely to be concentrated in less regions/markets. Furthermore, perceived export barriers were found to be a significant moderator of the effects of e-commerce usage on international intensity and international diversification. This suggests that e-commerce does not automatically facilitate the internationalisation of SMEs.

Drawing on social exchange and social comparison theories, the current work aims to examine the direct and indirect effect of sustainable leadership (SL) on employees’ change-oriented organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) through workplace envy (WE).

The authors collected data from multiple sources (311 employees and respective supervisors) of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Saudi Arabia. Partial least square-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) analysis was conducted to verify the proposed hypotheses.

The current empirical results confirmed that SL positively influences change-oriented OCB – both directly and indirectly (through WE). The negative impact of WE on change-oriented OCB is also concluded in this study.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is among pioneer studies which introduced inhibitor as a mediator in the “SL-employee behavioral outcomes” relationship. Limitations and implications have been elaborated at the end of the study.

This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of different prefabricated construction (PC) policies using a case study in Wuhan, considering the local context.

The effectiveness of PC policies is falling behind expectations. The main reason lies in an insufficient understanding of the policy impacts. An agent-based model was built by choosing the residential sector in a typical large city of Wuhan, China, as the study case. Different cost reduction scenarios were introduced for investigating the PC policy effectiveness. The proposed model and simulation approach can be used for other cities and generalized to the whole Chinese PC industry with the potential to include more local policies and corresponding data.

Simulation results show that carbon emission reduction will be between 60,000 and 80,000 tons with policy incentives, nearly double that of the no policy intervention scenario. The target of 30% PC in all new buildings by 2026 in China is achievable with the subsidy policies of linear cost reduction, or cost reduction conforms to the learning curve.

Simulation results of three kinds of policy show that subsidy policy optimization is necessary regarding reducing the level of subsidy needed. The carbon credit policy is not essential since it has little influence on PC development. Implementing the project procurement restriction policy is not recommended if the scale of development of PC is more important than achieving the development target.

This study can help the government and developers make better policy and strategic decisions on PC development and boost the sustainability transition of the construction industry.

Overqualification is a growing concern for employers in many countries. The practice of mismatching employees and positions inevitably leads to an increase in organizational training and management costs. This study can not only further enrich the theoretical achievements in the field of human resource management, but can also provide a reference for enterprise managers on how to effectively stimulate employees' innovative behaviour.

503 questionnaire responses were analysed using SPSS 24.0 and Mplus 8.0.

It was concluded that, (1) perceived overqualification is negatively related to employees' innovation behaviour (β = −0.32, p < 0.001); (2) psychological contract breach and psychological distance partially mediate the relationship between perceived overqualification and employees' innovation behaviour. Among them, the mediating effect of psychological contract breach was −0.14 (p < 0.01), and that of psychological distance was −0.12 (p < 0.001); the chain-mediating effect of psychological contract breach and psychological distance was −0.09 (p < 0.01); (3) employment relationship atmosphere played a moderating role in the relationship between perceived overqualification and employees' innovation behaviour (β = 0.04, p < 0.01).

This study verifies the negative impact of perceived overqualification on employee innovation behaviour and reveals the mediating role of psychological factors between the two. It also discusses the moderating effect of employment relationship climate on the relationship between perceived overqualification and employees' innovation behaviour.

To provide insight into how employees react during challenging economic times, this paper aims to examine employee responses to non-fulfilled employer obligations. More specifically, the authors examine two main issues: first, whether perceptions of organizational obstruction (PO Obstruction) mediate the relationship between psychological contract breach and intent to quit, as well as between psychological contract breach and willingness to support the organization, and second, whether breach moderates the relationship between PO Obstruction and intent to quit as well as between PO Obstruction and willingness to support the organization.

To test the hypotheses, the authors conducted a field study in which 316 employees took part.

The results indicate that PO Obstruction mediates the relationship between breach and employee outcomes. Regarding the moderating effects of the breach, the findings suggest that breach strengthens the positive relationship between PO Obstruction and intent to quit while it weakens the negative relationship between PO Obstruction and willingness to support the organization.

This paper contributes to the existing literature by introducing a new perspective of the breach-outcome relationship.

Recent advancements in the field of organizational psychology have transformed the employees’ perceptions related to the reactions of the employment relationship. The main aim of the study is to explore the consequences of psychological contracts among the nursing staff and how to provide better patient care and quality service in the health-care system as nurses play a pivotal role in the context of Pakistan. Significantly, this study attempts to bridge the research gap by exploring consequences of psychological contracts. Drawing on the social exchange theory, this study examined the psychological contracts of nurses and their reactions to the perceived violation.

This research adopted a qualitative method and was based on an exploratory approach. Data were collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews from 21 nurses working in public, private and charity hospitals in Karachi, Pakistan. The thematic content analysis is employed for the analysis of data by using NVivo software.

The study identified the relational and transactional elements related to the psychological contract of nurses who predominantly consisted of supervisor support, autonomy, tangible/intangible rewards and trust. The intrinsic motivation which relates to their devotion to work was found as an additional element to balance their psychological contract. This research also establishes that the psychological contract of nurses is being violated in their work settings.

By highlighting the importance of psychological contract breach, the findings demonstrate that health-care institutions should take measures to cope with psychological contract breach issues at the workplace.

This study contributes to the body of knowledge by exploring psychological contract breach. Substantially, there are rare studies conducted on psychological contract breach among nurses in developing country context (Pakistan). However, this study adds to the previous studies related to the psychological contract of nurses in the context of Pakistan by using social exchange theories. Finally, this study enables the management of healthcare to balance the psychological contract issues effectively.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how qualitative case research (QCR) has been conducted in the field of international entrepreneurship (IE) in terms of onto-epistemology and methodology. QCR can serve as an umbrella approach for contextualizing and capturing the complexity of IE opportunities, events, conditions and relationships, and to illuminate and enrich the understanding of related IE processes.

A thorough literature review was conducted of IE journal articles published between 1989 and mid-2017. This paper identified and analyzed 292 journal articles in terms of theoretical purpose and research design.

The findings suggest that the “positivistic” QCR is the customary convention of QCR in IE. “Exploratory” and “theory building” are the two most commonly pursued objectives. There have also been atypical practices and increased methodological rigor in recent years. Alternative paradigmatic QCRs that depart from positivistic assumptions are in an early stage of development in IE.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research examining QCR onto-epistemology and methodology approaches in IE, providing a useful state of the art that has been hitherto lacking in the literature. Based on this paper’s findings, the authors suggest that the IE field would benefit from greater methodological transparency in the reporting and writing of QCR. Also, the breadth of knowledge and legitimacy of the IE area would be enhanced through more studies involving unconventional (beyond positivistic) QCR.

This study aims to systematically review papers on women’s entrepreneurship in the internationalization of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) by examining the research profile (i.e. publication trends, publishers, domain and quality of journals, methodologies and units of analysis and regional classifications), internationalization entry modes and the theories underpinning, key variables using AMO framework (i.e. antecedents, mediators, moderators and outcomes) and suggestions for potential future studies.

This study used bibliometric analysis by selecting 62 relevant papers from 3,016 papers collected from the Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar and EBSCO databases. Content analysis was conducted to identify key research issues and gaps, which were then mapped on an AMO framework to address potential future research.

This study found that the number of papers published during the period 1994–September 2022 fluctuated, indicating an increasing trend of women’s entrepreneurship research in the internationalization of SMEs being published in various reputable journals by well-known publishers. This study also found several alternatives of internationalization entry modes, although export is still the most widely used alternative. Various theories that underlie this research include internationalization theory, resource-based theory, feminist theory and international entrepreneurship. This study proposes a future research framework on women’s entrepreneurship in the internationalization of SMEs: AMO.

This study contributes to the intersection of gender-focused international business and entrepreneurship domains. This study proposes a conceptual model of women’s entrepreneurship in internationalization of SMEs by mapping the antecedents, mediators/moderators and outcomes and offers promising opportunities for future research directions.