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The purpose of this paper is to explore an innovative teaching design to teach accounting management that aims to foster students’ technical and soft skills. The effectiveness of this new teaching design addresses current concerns for universities preparing students for the future.

The paper deploys the qualitative research methodology and applies multiple methods to gather data in a case study. The researchers collected data through pre- and post-surveys of individual students, three half-day observations on the five project teams and a one-hour long semi-structured interview with a focus group.

Five themes emerged in the research to support the effectiveness of the new teaching design. The study also showed that students’ abilities in self-directed learning (SDL) link to their learning experiences. When students were more capable of initiating learning, such ability enriched their practices of soft skills in the team setting.

This one-shot study had a small group of homogeneous participants and had no baseline comparison to identify the increment of students’ soft skills.

The findings provide valuable insights into the course design and implementation of the teaching approach for the future. The paper suggests that fostering students’ SDL will increase the effectiveness of soft skills development.

This empirical research extends current knowledge of teaching soft skills and calls for action on the development of students’ SDL abilities.

We argue that the influence of public stakeholders (the state) and private stakeholders (nonstate social or economic stakeholders) on corporate philanthropy is interdependent, in that satisfying the state may increase the degree of scrutiny and pressure exerted by private stakeholders on the firm, particularly in institutional environments that place few checks and balances on the power of the state – thus creating suspicion that political patronage shelters firms’ social and moral wrongdoing. To test this theory, we examine the circumstances under which politically patronized firms engage more (or less) in corporate philanthropy. Utilizing a dataset that encompasses both publically traded and unlisted private firms in China, we find that corporate philanthropy is negatively associated with political patronage among unlisted firms but positively associated with political patronage among listed firms. These results are consistent with the predictions made based on our theoretical arguments. This chapter aims to foster further discussion regarding the interdependence of the influences exerted by different stakeholders on firms.

Public reviews on educational robots are of great importance for the design, development and management of the most advanced robots with an educational purpose. This study explores the public attitudes and emotions toward educational robots through online reviews on Weibo and Twitter by using text mining methods.

Our study applied topic modeling to reveal latent topics about educational robots through online reviews on Weibo and Twitter. The similarities and differences in preferences for educational robots among public on different platforms were analyzed. An enhanced sentiment classification model based on three-way decision was designed to evaluate the public emotions about educational robots.

For Weibo users, positive topics tend to the characteristics, functions and globalization of educational robots. In contrast, negative topics are professional quality, social crisis and emotion experience. For Twitter users, positive topics are education curricula, social interaction and education supporting. The negative topics are teaching ability, humanistic care and emotion experience. The proposed sentiment classification model combines the advantages of deep learning and traditional machine learning, which improves the classification performance with the help of the three-way decision. The experiments show that the performance of the proposed sentiment classification model is better than other six well-known models.

Different from previous studies about attitudes analysis of educational robots, our study enriched this research field in the perspective of data-driven. Our findings also provide reliable insights and tools for the design, development and management of educational robots, which is of great significance for facilitating artificial intelligence in education.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the economic feasibility of a three-echelon Halal Meat Supply Chain (HMSC) network that is monitored by a proposed radio frequency identification (RFID)-based management system for enhancing the integrity traceability of Halal meat products and to maximize the average integrity number of Halal meat products, maximize the return of investment (ROI), maximize the capacity utilization of facilities and minimize the total investment cost of the proposed RFID-monitoring system. The location-allocation problem of facilities needs also to be resolved in conjunction with the quantity flow of Halal meat products from farms to abattoirs and from abattoirs to retailers.

First, a deterministic multi-objective mixed integer linear programming model was developed and used for optimizing the proposed RFID-based HMSC network toward a comprised solution based on four conflicting objectives as described above. Second, a stochastic programming model was developed and used for examining the impact on the number of Halal meat products by altering the value of integrity percentage. The ε-constraint approach and the modified weighted sum approach were proposed for acquisition of non-inferior solutions obtained from the developed models. Furthermore, the Max-Min approach was used for selecting the best solution among them.

The research outcome shows the applicability of the developed models using a real case study. Based on the computational results, a reasonable ROI can be achievable by implementing RFID into the HMSC network.

This work addresses interesting avenues for further research on exploring the HMSC network design under different types of uncertainties and transportation means. Also, environmentalism has been becoming increasingly a significant global problem in the present century. Thus, the presented model could be extended to include the environmental aspects as an objective function.

The model can be utilized for food supply chain designers. Also, it could be applied to realistic problems in the field of supply chain management.

Although there were a few studies focusing on the configuration of a number of HMSC networks, this area is overlooked by researchers. The study shows the developed methodology can be a useful tool for designers to determine a cost-effective design of food supply chain networks.

With the continuous improvement of public–private partnership (PPP) projects, the participants' value creation goals are not only limited to achieving the basic performance objectives but also to realising value added. However, the effect of traditional contract management on realising the value creation objectives of PPP projects is limited. According to the view of multifunctional contract, joint-contract functions that integrate contract control and flexibility are likely to be effective in enhancing the value creation of PPP projects. This study aims to explore the effects of joint-contract functions on PPP project value creation and relevant influencing mechanism by investigating the mediating effect of in-role behaviour and extra-role behaviour.

After collecting 258 valid questionnaires from PPP professionals in China, this study used structural equation modelling to validate the hypotheses.

Contract control and flexibility can improve PPP project value creation. Specifically, contract control improves the achievement of the basic contract objectives of PPP projects, whereas contract flexibility enhances the achievement of the value-added of PPP projects. Moreover, only in-role behaviour mediates the effect of contract control on value creation. In addition, the mediating effect of extra-role behaviour on the impact of contract flexibility on value creation is stronger than that of in-role behaviour. The mediating effect of in- and extra-role behaviour is mainly reflected in the realisation of basic and value-added performance, respectively.

The findings of this study can help realise value creation in three ways. Firstly, new perspectives for PPP project value creation should be proposed by combining the improvement of contract objectives and the realisation of the participants' implicit demands. Secondly, the effects of different contract functions on value creation should be analysed instead of a single dimension of contractual governance. Thirdly, the mediating effects of different types of cooperation behaviour that may influence the relationship between contractual governance and value creation should be evaluated.

This study verifies the impacts of different contract functions on PPP project value creation. In addition, cooperative behaviour is embedded as a mediating variable, and the mediated transmission path from contract function to cooperative behaviour and further to PPP project value creation is systematically analysed.

Although a growing body of research has found evidence of anti-public sector bias – a negative stereotype that the performance of the public sector is worse than that of the private sector, whether this phenomenon is universal across situations is still an unknown topic to be further discussed. The purpose of this study is to examine how citizens assess the public sector in Chinese context, as well as the source and deep logic of this evaluation.

Through two survey experiments (N = 1,375), this paper empirically explores how citizens evaluate the public sector in the Chinese context and the cross-context stability of this attitude. At the same time, two focus group interviews (N = 12) are used to deeply analyze the source and internal logic of this attitude.

In China, there is no anti-public sector bias in the public evaluation of the public sector. On the contrary, there is a certain degree of pro-public sector preference, that is, the public has a more positive view of the public sector than the private sector. We also find that this preference has strong cross-context stability, which will not be affected by different performance information or failure public events with different severity. The study also finds that Chinese citizens' preference for the public sector is not only the product of traditional political culture, but also the result of authoritarian propaganda. More importantly, it is a personal rational choice based on institutional performance.

This study provides a good example to explore how the public views the public sector in countries where the proportion of public sector supply far exceeds that of non-public sector. The results increase the academic understanding of how citizens assess the public sector and why this evaluation comes into being. The results enlighten significance for future theoretical research on the main body of public service providers and their performance views. It also provides micro-evidence of behavioral public performance for cross-sectoral comparison between public sector and private sector.

This study responds to the need in social entrepreneurship research for more empirical studies to clarify the meaning of social value. Specially, it aims to explore the meaning of social value communicated on social media (SoMe) within the local context of a social enterprise (SE).

A multimodal social semiotic approach was applied to several hundred Facebook posts of a Finnish SE providing elderly care solutions, complemented by secondary data from high-quality press sources.

Building on Young’s (2006) dimensions of social value and Hidalgo et al.’s (2021) theorisation of social capital in social entrepreneurship, the authors find that an SE draws on multiple levels of social capital on SoMe to express the meaning of the social value it creates.

Although limited to one case, this study provides a deep contextual understanding of how SEs can give meaning to social value and leverage social capital on SoMe to do so.

The authors offer a contextually embedded framework for SEs to communicate social value through media. This approach enables SEs to engage stakeholders more effectively and improve the quality of support for local initiatives.

Improvements in SEs’ ability to communicate social value will increase their legitimacy, thus enhancing their prospects to survive and create sustained social value.

The authors strengthen the theoretical underpinnings of social value by being among the first to empirically describe its connection to social capital in an SE, thereby deepening previous studies on subjective social value. Methodologically, this study is the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to apply social semiotics to research on SEs.

This study explores the motives and objectives of sports sponsorship in China, taking into account the sports, social and cultural contexts. It also adopts a comparative approach to examine the sponsorship of elite and grassroots sports events in China.

This study adopts a qualitative approach, employing semi-structured interviews with representatives of nine companies sponsoring elite and/or grassroots sports events in Western China. The data were analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis.

In China, sponsors are frequently driven to sponsor elite sport events by a sense of obligation and responsibility to the country, whereas their motives to sponsor grassroots sport events is primarily influenced by sincerity and goodwill. Chinese companies consider brand awareness, exposure and the relationship with the government and authorities as key factors for sponsorship, and use sponsorship to achieve market-related objectives.

Companies’ sponsorship motives and objectives have received significant attention in the literature, but mainly in Western countries. In the context of China, this study identifies how sponsors utilize social networks to shape their motives and objectives. It also reveals certain patterns common with the current literature, as well as specificities such as how the roles of the government and authorities are linked to the contingent economic and social context of the country. Furthermore, the differences between elite and grassroots sports events sponsorship are explained.

This paper aims to explore the influence of applied pressure on the tribological properties of the friction component in a wet multi-disc clutch during the running-in process.

The running-in evolutionary was explored in terms of global friction performance. The variation of friction torque and mean COF of the initial 300 engagement cycles was obtained by full-scale tests. Finally, an optical microscope was used to detect the wear characteristics of friction surfaces.

The applied pressure showed a significant influence on the tribological behaviors of wet clutches during the running-in process. The mean COF decreased and then increases with the increase of the applied pressure. A higher applied pressure contributed to more asperity summits being sheared, thus resulting in a smoother surface. Considering a suitable wore performance, properly applied pressure is necessary.

The results provide theoretical guidance for selecting the optimal applied pressure in the running-in of wet clutches.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/ILT-08-2022-0256/