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This paper aims to show that systemic methods and thinking can be used to develop useful tools to address problems open in traditional science, such as Newtonian physics, universal gravitation, planetary motions, and the three‐body problem.

Expanded on the yoyo model introduced earlier for general systems, a new figurative analysis method is introduced in this paper.

After establishing its theoretical and empirical foundations, this method is used to generalize Newton's laws of mechanics by addressing several unsettled problems in the history. Through the concept of equal quantitative effects, it is argued that this new method possesses some strength not found in pure quantitative methods. After studying the characteristics of whole evolutions of converging and diverging fluid motions, the concept of time is revisited using the new model. As further applications of the new method, one covers Kepler's laws of planetary motion, Newton's law of universal gravitation, and explains why planets travel along elliptical orbits, why no external forces are needed for systems to revolve about one another, and why binary star systems, tri‐nary star systems, and even n‐nary star systems can exist, for any natural number n≥2. By checking the study of the three‐body problem, a brand new method is provided to analyze the movement of three stars, visible or invisible. At the end, some open problems are cast for future research.

This paper shows for the first time in history that several well‐established laws in physics can be generalized using systemic thinking. Beyond that, an operative method of analysis is introduced to investigate problems that have been extremely difficult to handle in the scientific history. With adequate quantitative tools developed to accompany this method, it can be reasonably expected that an active systemic scientific era with a slightly different tilt from the contemporary science will follow shortly.

The purpose of this study is to understand how a large service organisation with a brand portfolio manages its corporate brand relative to its portfolio of product brands.

The authors use an interpretivist research paradigm to investigate four research questions concerning the relative roles of corporate and product brands, the role of the CEO, the structures and capabilities that support the development of brand equity (including the role of the marketing function) and the role of employees in building corporate brand equity. A case study design was used, and the Tsogo Sun, one of the largest hotel and casino organisations in Africa, was the focus of the investigation.

The findings highlight the important role of both the CEO and the marketing department in optimising brand equity and managing across corporate and product brands. Employees were found to play a critical role and the need to clarify their relative roles as both recipients and expressors of brand identity across corporate and product brands emerged as an important theme.

Although the corporate brand has received much attention in recent years, much of literature remains conceptual. In addition to responding to calls for empirical research, the paper also contributes to deepening understanding about how to manage a corporate brand alongside a number of product brands.

With the increasing demand for high-quality economical and sustainable historic building repair and maintenance (R&M) allied with the perennial problem of skills shortages (project management (PM) and on-site practice) investment in new technologies becomes paramount for modernising training and practice. Yet, the historic R&M industry, in particular small- and medium-sized enterprises have yet to benefit from digital technologies (such as laser scanning, virtual reality and cloud computing) which have the potential to enhance performance and productivity. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A qualitative participatory action research approach was adopted. One demonstration project (Project A) exhibiting critical disrepair, showcasing the piloting of a five phased digitised “process-wheel” intended to provide a common framework for facilitating collaboration of project stakeholders thereby aiding successful project delivery is reported. Five semi-structured interviews were conducted with industry employers to facilitate the process-wheel concept development.

Implementing only Phase 1 of the digitised “process-wheel” (e-Condition surveying incorporating laser scanning) resulted in an estimated 25-30 per cent cost and time savings, when compared to conventional methods. The accrued benefits are twofold: provide a structured standardised data capturing approach that is shared in a common project repository amongst relevant stakeholders; inform the application of digital technologies to attain efficiencies across various phases of the process-wheel.

This paper has provided original and valuable information on the benefits of modernising R&M practice, highlighting the importance of continued investment in innovative processes and new technologies for historic building R&M to enhance existing practice and in form current training provision. Future work will focus on further piloting and validation of the process-wheel in its entirety on selected demonstration projects with a view of supporting the industry to digitise its workflows and going fully digital to realise optimum process efficiencies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how exposure to a cause-related marketing (CRM) initiative involving sport teams affects attitude formation for the team and its amplification of purchase intention for team-branded merchandise. Specifically, this paper assessed the role of distinct measures (warmth, brand attitude, admiration and success) on purchase intention.

The hypothesized model was tested using a 2 (promotion: CRM vs non-CRM) × 2 (team: successful vs unsuccessful) between-subjects design. Following MANCOVA analysis, the moderating effect of success was explored within the sequential moderated mediation model where perceived warmth and brand attitude explicated the effect of CRM exposure on purchase intention.

The results of this paper suggest that a “Warmth Effect” played a prominent role in shaping consumer perception for sports teams when partnered with a non-profit brand in a CRM appeal. Perceived team success was revealed as moderator, while warmth, brand attitude served as serial mediators on purchase intention.

This paper provides evidence-based insights to sport marketers to leverage CRM strategy in strengthening brand-related outcomes. Sport marketers may find the CRM strategy useful for engaging “casual” fans. Further analysis is needed to determine the generalizability of this consumer response to CRM in other product domains.

Practical implications include leveraging CRM strategy to strengthen brand-related outcomes (i.e. perceived warmth, brand attitude and purchase intention), while also being mindful of the timing of CRM initiatives to optimize engagement. Sport marketers may find the CRM strategy useful for engaging “casual” fans.

This paper lends clarity to brand attitude formation in the context of CRM. The findings of this paper demonstrate the influence of perceived warmth, brand attitude and success on purchase intention.

Nowadays, some online retailing platforms emerge to integrate transport capacity to provide standard distribution service for sellers. Such an integrated form of service is defined as delivery alliance (DA). To have a better understanding of how to price the service, this study aims to fixate on the seller’s problems and builds a series of profit maximization models in accordance with the two-sided market pricing theory within a platform business model.

In the present study, some optimization models are built in the two-sided market type and the optimal solutions are found in a three-dimensional decision space. By using the basic model as the benchmark, some optimization problems of DA in realistic situations are discussed. Particularly, a power-law-distribution model is established to deal with the uncertainty in forecasting. Also, a price-sensitive model and a loss-aversion model are presented to describe the various reactions of sellers to charging modes. Finally, some combined situations are discussed and the strategies are compared under the mentioned models.

By selecting the basic model as the benchmark, the specific pricing strategies are found for each context to yield the optimal profits. The flexibility of pricing strategy in the basic model and rigid pricing strategies in extended models, are discussed. As a result, the guidelines for the online retailing platforms are developed on designing and pricing the DA service.

First, it would be interesting to expand the pricing plan of the platform. For instance, menu pricing and quantity discount have not been considered, which are common in practice. The time discounting has also been ignored. If the time value were calculated, the contract fees would be more critical due to the earliest of collecting money. Finally, those joiners who have huge order sizes are crucial for the ecosystem indeed, but arouse no attention. While in reality, they may have more power to bargain with the platform. Thus, how the platform competition affects the pricing strategies needs future research.

The optimal pricing strategies under these models are analytically found out, and it is shown that the presented models result in the same scale of joiners and profits in optimization. This suggests that DA works well in various behavioral contexts. This also suggests that DA is a significant controller in service quality improvement. Then, the optimal pricing strategies are compared among all the models. During this, it is discovered that the realistic contexts might reduce the profit, whereas an appropriate pricing strategy can pull this back without loss of service quality.

This paper comparatively assesses the connections between individual demographic traits, occupational characteristics, and organizational factors and officers' attitudes toward important groups in China and Taiwan.

Survey data used in this study were collected from 722 police officers from mainland China and 531 officers from Taiwan. Multivariate regression analyses were conducted to assess the correlates of police attitudes toward peers, supervisors, and citizens.

The Chinese and Taiwanese officers do not differ in their trust in peers, but the Chinese officers hold significantly more positive views on the trustworthiness of supervisors and citizens compared to the Taiwanese officers. Supervisor justice and organizational identification are significant predictors of officers' attitudes toward all three groups in both countries.

A major limitation revolves around the inability to test and explain exactly why findings from the two groups vary in their ways. Future research should include specific social, political, and cultural predictors.

This study represents one of the few studies that compare police attitudes toward important groups of peers, supervisors, and citizens across nations/cultures.

Purpose – This study examines how managerial ability relates to employee productivity using a broad and generalized sample of US firms.

Methodology – This study employs a generalized sample of firm-years from all industries between 1980 and 2013.

Findings – By contending that managers differ in their ability to synchronize management processes and human capital in ways that enhance employee productivity, the authors provide evidence showing that more-able managers are associated with higher employee productivity. In addition, the authors find that high-ability managers moderate the negative relation between uncertain environments (high-technology firms) and employee productivity. Furthermore, the authors decompose employee productivity into employee efficiency components and employee cost components. The authors find a significant positive association between managerial ability and the employee efficiency component, but do not see a significant association between managerial ability and the employee cost component.

Value – The results contribute to the understanding of employee productivity by showing the relation between managerial ability and employee productivity.

This paper aims to introduce a novel algorithm to solve initial/boundary value problems of high-order ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and high-order system of ordinary differential equations (SODEs).

The proposed method is based on Hermite polynomials and extreme learning machine (ELM) algorithm. The Hermite polynomials are chosen as basis function of hidden neurons. The approximate solution and its derivatives are expressed by utilizing Hermite network. The model function is designed to automatically meet the initial or boundary conditions. The network parameters are obtained by solving a system of linear equations using the ELM algorithm.

To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, a variety of differential equations are selected and their numerical solutions are obtained by utilizing the Hermite extreme learning machine (H-ELM) algorithm. Experiments on the common and random data sets indicate that the H-ELM model achieves much higher accuracy, lower complexity but stronger generalization ability than existed methods. The proposed H-ELM algorithm could be a good tool to solve higher order linear ODEs and higher order linear SODEs.

The H-ELM algorithm is developed for solving higher order linear ODEs and higher order linear SODEs; this method has higher numerical accuracy and stronger superiority compared with other existing methods.

Dunhuang murals are rich in cultural and artistic value. The purpose of this paper is to construct a novel mobile visual search (MVS) framework for Dunhuang murals, enabling users to efficiently search for similar, relevant and diversified images.

The convolutional neural network (CNN) model is fine-tuned in the data set of Dunhuang murals. Image features are extracted through the fine-tuned CNN model, and the similarities between different candidate images and the query image are calculated by the dot product. Then, the candidate images are sorted by similarity, and semantic labels are extracted from the most similar image. Ontology semantic distance (OSD) is proposed to match relevant images using semantic labels. Furthermore, the improved DivScore is introduced to diversify search results.

The results illustrate that the fine-tuned ResNet152 is the best choice to search for similar images at the visual feature level, and OSD is the effective method to search for the relevant images at the semantic level. After re-ranking based on DivScore, the diversification of search results is improved.

This study collects and builds the Dunhuang mural data set and proposes an effective MVS framework for Dunhuang murals to protect and inherit Dunhuang cultural heritage. Similar, relevant and diversified Dunhuang murals are searched to meet different demands.