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A novel chitosan derivative, O-acrylamidomethyl-HTCC (NMA-HTCC) was synthesized in two steps. First, N-[(2-hydroxy-3-trimethylammonium)propyl] chitosan chloride (HTCC) was prepared by introducing 2,3-epoxy propane trimethlyl ammonium chloride(GTA) on the amino groups of chitosan. HTCC was further modified by reacting with N-methylolacrylamide (NMA) on the primary alcohol groups (C-6) on the chitosan. The effect of modified chitosan on the dyeing properties of cotton fabric was studied by measuring the dye uptake and K/S values of the treated substrates with different treating processes under salt-free conditions. The antimicrobial activity of modified chitosan against Escherichia coli and the durability of antimicrobial activity was assessed using percentage reduction rate of the bacterium with different treating processes. The results indicate that modified chitosan treated cotton fabric shows increased dye uptake, K/S values and fastness, and its antimicrobial activity and durability are much better than chitosan treated cotton fabric.

The purpose of the study is to explore the relationship between leader bottom-line mentality (BLM) and employee social cyberloafing behavior. Based on social exchange theory, the authors propose that leader BLM will promote employee social cyberloafing behavior via psychological contract breach, especially when employee needs for relatedness is high.

To test the hypotheses, the authors conducted a multi-wave, multi-source field study with 185 paired employee–leader dyads at three time points. The hypotheses were tested by Mplus with a bootstrap approach to obtain confidence intervals.

The results show that leader BLM has a positive impact on employee social cyberloafing behavior, which is mediated by psychological contract breach. In addition, employee needs for relatedness moderates this process. Specifically, when employees pertain high needs for relatedness, the influence of leader BLM will be stronger.

This research paper highlights the detrimental influence of leader BLM and provide directions for preventing employee cyberloafing behavior.

Previous studies have drawn inconsistent conclusions on the effectiveness of leader BLM, such as enhancing task performance and eliciting social undermining. This study further explores the underlying mechanism linking leader BLM to employee social cyberloafing behavior and the boundary conditions. This has subsequently provided practitioners with new perspectives regarding why employees engage in counter-productive social cyberloafing.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the most interesting research question of the past decade – What Lures the Bears? Leveraging the public sector management and international business strategy literature, the paper first presents an overview of the transformational dynamics of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in three major phases – institutionalization, privatization, and corporatization, and internationalization. Then, it analyzes geographic patterns and industry trends of the outward foreign direct investment (FDI) projects announced by SOEs over an eight-year period.

Grounded in the exploratory research such as inductive and deductive logic, the study proposes theoretical constructs, and discusses several findings based on the data accessed from highly cited archival sources, such as the UNCTAD FDI stat/WIRs, the World Development Indicators, Doing Business Report, Global Competitiveness Report, the Index of Economic Freedom, the Academic Ranking of World Universities, and the Fortune Global 500.

Based on an analysis of global market trends (a sample of over 20 countries and five industries), the study highlights that SOEs from Asia and Europe have been greatly expanded into developed markets, thus to secure natural resources, to acquire strategic assets like technology, and to leverage the developed financial markets and better investment environment. Therefore, SOEs’ outward FDI strategy and overseas performance was driven by institutional transitions, resource security, home market development and government legitimacy may contribute to the competitive advantage of their home country.

The study offers several implications for the policymakers of the governments in emerging economies and bureaucratic management of SOEs. It recommends that state ownership pattern and bureaucratic system of SOEs need to be reexamined, revised, and corporatized in the changing dynamics of the multinational business environment, thus to secure resources, acquire technological know-how, and compete in home and global markets.

As a response to academic calls on the globalization, performance and governance mechanisms of SOEs in and out of emerging economies, this paper draws a unique presentation of the transformational dynamics of SOEs – establishment to internationalization.

Structural color is more brilliant in color, more resistant to sunshine and will not fade away with time, and more environmental friendly than traditional dyes and pigments. The purpose of this paper is to prepare structural colors of fabrics coated with Ag/TiO₂ composite films by magnetron sputtering, and analyze the relationship between the colors and the thicknesses of TiO₂ films in Ag/TiO₂ composite films.

Preparation of Ag/TiO₂ composite films by magnetron sputtering and their deposition on textiles were investigated. The chemical compositions and surface morphology of Ag/TiO₂ composite films were examined by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy, and the structural color of fabric coated with Ag/TiO₂ composite film was also analyzed.

Ag/TiO₂ composite films deposited on textile substrate exhibited structural colors, and the bright colors could be adjusted and controlled by the thickness of TiO₂ thin films in Ag/TiO₂ composite films without any dyes or pigments. By comparing the results of theoretical calculation and experimental results, it was found that the creation of structural colors by the experiment was coincident to the colors by theoretical calculation according to the film interference principle. There was a linear relationship between the thickness of TiO₂ film and the wavelength of the structural color.

Compared to traditional coloration by dyes or pigments, the coloration of textile by structural color from Ag/TiO₂ composite films prepared by magnetron sputtering was very environmental friendly and simple without water consuming, time consuming and tedious work. Structural colors have great potential applications in textiles in place of traditional dyes and pigments. Furthermore, the textiles coated with Ag/TiO₂ composite films have good electrical, optical and magnetic properties, and can be used in apparel, home furnishings and industrial fabrics.

Aspect category-based sentiment analysis (ACSA) has been widely used in consumer preference mining and marketing strategy formulation. However, existing studies ignore the variability in features and the intrinsic correlation among diverse aspect categories in ACSA tasks. To address these problems, this paper aims to propose a novel integrated framework.

The integrated framework consists of three modules: text feature extraction and fusion, adaptive feature selection and category-aware decision fusion. First, text features from global and local views are extracted and fused to comprehensively capture the potential information in the different dimensions of the review text. Then, an adaptive feature selection strategy is devised for each aspect category to determine the optimal feature set. Finally, considering the intrinsic associations between aspect categories, a category-aware decision fusion strategy is constructed to enhance the performance of ACSA tasks.

Comparative experimental results demonstrate that the integrated framework can effectively detect aspect categories and their corresponding sentiment polarities from review texts, achieving a macroaveraged F1 score (Fmacro) of 72.38% and a weighted F1 score (F1) of 79.39%, with absolute gains of 2.93% to 27.36% and 4.35% to 20.36%, respectively, compared to the baselines.

This framework can simultaneously detect aspect categories and corresponding sentiment polarities from review texts, thereby assisting e-commerce enterprises in gaining insights into consumer preferences, prioritizing product improvements, and adjusting marketing strategies.

This study aims to investigate whether the contract manufacturer (CM) should take the first-mover advantage in the end-product without supplying core components to the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) immediately, or should fully squeeze the benefit of the learning effect through an amplified production quantity by letting the OEM enter the end-product market early.

The authors propose a two-period model for a supply chain consisting of a CM and an OEM where the CM has four alternative entry strategies concerning it competition to the OEM in the end-product market. For each strategy, the authors derive the equilibrium solutions of the two firms using a backward approach. Comparison leads to the CM’s final choices among the four strategies.

For both CM and OEM, the monopoly and the first-entry strategies will be dominated by either the post-entry or the simultaneous-entry strategy, and thus, their preferred strategy is chosen from the latter two. Regarding the two firms choices between the post- and simultaneous-entry strategy, the CM prefers the post-entry strategy when the OEMs brand premium is at a moderate level, whereas the OEM prefers the post-entry strategy when its brand premium is low, and the learning effect can amplify the interval for the CMs adopting the post-entry strategy as well as changes the interval for the OEMs preference related to the two strategies.

This paper is the first one to explore the optimal strategy for a CM to maximize its profit in a co-opetitive supply chain situation with a CM and an OEM. The authors believe that our paper contributes to both literature and the market.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue on state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the contemporary global business scenario. Against the theoretical background of and the invited themes for the special issue, the paper presents a summary of key findings and practical implications of the accepted papers and suggests future research directions.

The paper is conceptual, which organized through utilitarianism or legitimism; SOEs scenario 1 – hungry fox, hunting bears; SOEs scenario 2 – dancing elephant, flying bears; what do we know and what we wish to explore; what have been examined; what we need to study further; closing note by bears’ well-wishers; and protocol of the special issue.

By deeply looking into emerging economies (China, India), developed economies (Denmark, Italy, Sweden), transition economies (Tunisia) and diverse sectors (public transport, space), coupled with cross-country sample data, the nine accepted papers have discussed several interesting findings and recommended numerous implications for the policymakers and SOEs’ managers. Drawing upon the interdisciplinary literature, empirical and qualitative papers would deepen the understanding of the growth strategies and performance of SOEs, and the application of management theories such as institutional theory, agency theory, social exchange theory, managerial grid theory, incomplete contracts theory and public governance view, among others. The issue also brings a review-cum-citation analysis paper on the impact of privatization on the performance of SOEs.

The papers have made unique contributions to the public economics, new public management, international business and organizational development literature by critically analyzing the burgeoning phenomenon of the changing dynamics and globalization of SOEs.

This study aims to provide an in-depth understanding of big data analytics (BDA) in human resource management (HRM). The emergence of digital technology and the availability of large volume, high velocity and a great variety of data has forced the HRM to adopt the BDA in managing the workforce.

This paper evaluates the past, present and future trends of HRM through the bibliometric analysis of citation, co-citation and co-word analysis.

Findings from the analysis present significant research clusters that imply the knowledge structure and mapping of research streams in HRM. Challenges in BDA application and firm performances appear in all three bibliometric analyses, indicating this subject’s past, current and future trends in HRM.

Implications on the HRM landscape include fostering a data-driven culture in the workplace to reap the potential benefits of BDA. Firms must strategically adapt BDA as a change management initiative to transform the traditional way of managing the workforce toward adapting BDA as analytical tool in HRM decision-making.

This study presents past, present and future trends in BDA knowledge structure in human resources management.

Given that several publicly announced international merger and acquisition deals have been abandoned in recent years, the purpose of this paper is to present a synthesis of influential articles that examine organizational characteristics of cross-border acquisition transactions. The synthesis is framed through general traits and resources, learning and prior acquisition experience, and top-level management and governance attributes. Specifically, the paper conceptualizes key organizational attributes influencing the propensity of cross-border negotiations, and the most common characteristics and post-deal effects by illustrating several case examples from around the world.

Owing to fairness and integrity principles of the literature survey studies, the paper adopts an exploratory review design to present a synthesis of several influential articles published in strategy, international business and corporate finance journals. Since case method and storytelling are the best qualitative approaches to conceptualizing extant theoretical contributions, a number of case examples—successful, delayed and abandoned—from around the world have been discussed by leveraging the case information from archival sources.

Drawing on resource-based view, organizational learning, upper echelons and agency theory perspectives, the paper underscores three observations. First, organizational characteristics such as firm age, firm size, ownership structure, slack resources, marketing resources, technological intensity, export intensity and business group affiliation have different impacts on the propensity of publicly announced cross-border deals. Second, firm’s prior acquisition experience and firm’s acquisition experience in the target country have positive or moderating effects on the success of a cross-border merger. Third, top-level management characteristics such as CEO foreign nationality and CEO international career experience, and governance characteristics such as board size, the number of independent directors and directors with overseas experience, have mixed effects on the incidence of cross-border acquisitions.

The paper puts forth several recommendations for top-level managers participating in cross-border acquisition negotiations, such as learning from peers in the same industry, learning from predecessors in the target country and learning from failure negotiations in the same industry and other industries.

Nested within the organizational, international business strategy and corporate finance literature, the paper presents a synthesis of influential publications that study organizational characteristics affecting the propensity of cross-border acquisitions. The cases discussed in this paper are unique examples from around the world.