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Despite grave public concerns over information privacy and ongoing academic explorations of privacy policy, there is a general lack of understanding toward this issue in the legal context in China, the largest e-commerce market in the world. Departing from the extant literature of general discussion in nature, the authors undertook an exploratory study on the efficacy of e-commerce websites' privacy policies in China from the legal perspective.

The authors drew on a qualitative grounded theory approach to identify selective codes relating to the focal issue and established a theoretical framework therefrom. The authors then conducted theoretical integration by linking them to the Theory of Development Blocks and the System Justification Theory.

The research identifies a general distrust of Chinese consumers toward privacy policies and highlights that despite their growing concerns about privacy, the privacy policies are largely ineffective in reflecting legal enforcement, changing their perceptions or influencing purchase behaviors. It also reveals that the current Chinese legislation is unable to fully render consumers' confidence in e-commerce websites' privacy policies effectiveness and privacy protection due to its limited recognition and influences among them.

The research has multiple ramifications. The authors empirically confirmed a mismatch between customers' perception of privacy policies and their actual behaviors and then theoretically explained the seemingly conflicting scenario in the context of development block of legal enforcement and system justification. The authors theorized the absence of the legal enforcement in privacy policies to supplement the legal perspective to the literature. The research further leads us to suggest that the time has come to update and strongly enforce privacy regulation in China to fuel the further development of e-commerce sector in practice.

The purpose of this article is to outline a conceptual framework on mobile applications that support social interactions among users to warrant commercial viability of such applications.

We build on the social network paradigm to propose an activity-based view on mobile application usage, and theoretically link the pertinent features of mobile social networking applications (MSNAs) to a set of measurement metrics concerning their commercial viability.

The conceptual framework formulated highlights how MSNAs can be systematically designed and deployed to ensure their commercial viability.

A pertinent set of features that support social networking among the users, and their plausible mechanisms in facilitating the commercial viability of MSNAs, are explicated. This facilitates future research endeavours in systematically investigating the emerging form of mobile applications. The limitation lies in a lack of empirical data to validate the formulated propositions, which is beyond the scope of this paper and is directed for future research.

A coherent set of measurement metrics are put forward for practitioners to measure the commercial viability of an MSNA. Also theoretically based insights are derived for how they can better derive commercial values from the emerging form of mobile applications.

Most relevant previous research has focused either on the MSNAs’ technical design aspects or user behavioural issues. This research ties up the themes on technical design, user behaviour and business consideration in formulating a research framework for assessing the commercial viability of MSNAs.

This study aims to offer a bibliometric analysis of the already substantial and growing literature on global virtual teams (GVTs).

Using a systematic literature review approach, it identifies all articles in the Web of Science from 1999 to 2021 that include the term GVTs (in the title, the abstract or keywords) and finds 175 articles. The VOSviewer software was applied to analyze the bibliometric data.

The analysis revealed three dialogizing research clusters in the GVTs literature: a pioneering management information systems and organizational cluster, a general management cluster and a growing international management and behavioural studies cluster. Furthermore, it highlights the most cited articles, authors, journals and nations, and the network of strong and weak links regarding co-authorships and co-citations. Additionally, this study shows a change in research patterns regarding topics, journals and disciplinary approaches from 1999 to 2021. Finally, the analysis illustrates the position and centrality in the network of the most relevant actors.

The findings can guide management practitioners, educators and researchers to the most meaningful clusters of publications on GVTs, and help navigate and make sense of the vast body of the available literature. The importance of GVTs has been growing in the past two decades, and Covid-19 has accelerated the trend.

This study provides an updated and comprehensive systematic literature review on GVTs. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is also the first systematic literature review and bibliometry on GVTs. It concludes by suggesting future research paths.