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Article
Publication date: 5 January 2015

Xiang Yi, Barbara Ribbens, Linna Fu and Weibo Cheng

– The purpose of this paper is to compare and understand how age, gender and culture affect individual career and work-related attitudes in Chinese and American samples.

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to compare and understand how age, gender and culture affect individual career and work-related attitudes in Chinese and American samples.

Design/methodology/approach

Online and printed questionnaires were administered to employees and managers in China, whereas in the USA, faculty, staff and students at a Midwestern university responded to an online survey. Snowball sampling technique was used to collect data. Independent sample t-tests were conducted to test the hypothesis.

Findings

The study showed different work values and attitudes in the workplace between Chinese and the US samples, and indicated the specifics influences that national culture has on them. Culture affects generational changes; generational differences in the US sample are bigger than in Chinese sample; work values differ across generations and cultures; traditional gender role differences persist more strongly across generations in Chinese sample than in the US sample.

Research limitations/implications

Generalizability issues; cross-sectional data.

Practical implications

US-based multi-national corporations need to understand these differences and better manage their diverse employees operating in China.

Originality/value

This study compared generation, culture and gender differences simultaneously; parallel groups at similar life stages were used by basing the boundaries of each generation on the distinct cultural events of each nation. This approach is more consistent with generation definitions than by using influential specific events of each country, respectively. Useful to managers, it will provide guidance for understanding work values and attitudes across gender and generations in the USA and China. Most benefit will occur for US based multinational companies that have Chinese operations, and manage employees with cultural, gender and generational differences.

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Article
Publication date: 15 August 2018

Hua Pang

The purpose of this paper is to explore the Chinese microblog users’ psychological motivations and the association between users’ motivations and their offline civic and political…

1041

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore the Chinese microblog users’ psychological motivations and the association between users’ motivations and their offline civic and political engagement. Specifically, this study examines what the psychological impetuses of Weibo use are and how they promote the young citizens’ civic and political involvement.

Design/methodology/approach

The data were collected through the web-based survey with a total sample of 426 people. Principal components factor analysis, correlation analysis, and hierarchical multiple regressions were sequentially carried out to address the research questions.

Findings

The findings reveal that there are four major motives for using Weibo: information, socializing, recognition seeking and entertainment. Interestingly, seeking social needs is positively and significantly related to increasing young people’s civic participation, but not political participation.

Research limitations/implications

Theoretically, the research demonstrates that the uses and gratifications is a suitable approach for analysis of psychological antecedents of Weibo use and subsequent outcomes. Practically, it will help understand the dynamics of how the new media technology may engender democratic development and change.

Originality/value

Although the growing significance of social media has drawn considerable attention, little research has been conducted to assess the political consequences of Weibo. The current study fills the void by investigating whether Weibo functions as an effective tool to facilitate democratic engagement in contemporary China. The obtained results may provide insight into the relationship between the gratification structures and engagement in other social settings.

Details

Online Information Review, vol. 42 no. 5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1468-4527

Keywords

Available. Open Access. Open Access
Article
Publication date: 26 May 2023

Liyun Zeng, Rita Yi Man Li, Huiling Zeng and Lingxi Song

Global climate change speeds up ice melting and increases flooding incidents. China launched a sponge city policy as a holistic nature-based solution combined with urban planning…

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Abstract

Purpose

Global climate change speeds up ice melting and increases flooding incidents. China launched a sponge city policy as a holistic nature-based solution combined with urban planning and development to address flooding due to climate change. Using Weibo analytics, this paper aims to study public perceptions of sponge city.

Design/methodology/approach

This study collected 53,586 sponge city contents from Sina Weibo via Python. Various artificial intelligence tools, such as CX Data Science of Simply Sentiment, KH Coder and Tableau, were applied in the study.

Findings

76.8% of public opinion on sponge city were positive, confirming its positive contribution to flooding management and city branding. 17 out of 31 pilot sponge cities recorded the largest number of sponge cities related posts. Other cities with more Weibo posts suffered from rainwater and flooding hazards, such as Xi'an and Zhengzhou.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to explore the public perception of sponge city in Sina Weibo.

Details

International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management, vol. 16 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1756-8692

Keywords

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Book part
Publication date: 4 October 2022

Wei Cui

Abstract

Details

Crisis Communication in China
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80117-983-6

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Article
Publication date: 21 June 2024

Delin Yuan and Yang Li

When emergencies occur, the attention of the public towards emergency information on social media in a specific time period forms the emergency information popularity evolution…

85

Abstract

Purpose

When emergencies occur, the attention of the public towards emergency information on social media in a specific time period forms the emergency information popularity evolution patterns. The purpose of this study is to discover the popularity evolution patterns of social media emergency information and make early predictions.

Design/methodology/approach

We collected the data related to the COVID-19 epidemic on the Sina Weibo platform and applied the K-Shape clustering algorithm to identify five distinct patterns of emergency information popularity evolution patterns. These patterns include strong twin peaks, weak twin peaks, short-lived single peak, slow-to-warm-up single peak and slow-to-decay single peak. Oriented toward early monitoring and warning, we developed a comprehensive characteristic system that incorporates publisher features, information features and early features. In the early features, data measurements are taken within a 1-h time window after the release of emergency information. Considering real-time response and analysis speed, we employed classical machine learning methods to predict the relevant patterns. Multiple classification models were trained and evaluated for this purpose.

Findings

The combined prediction results of the best prediction model and random forest (RF) demonstrate impressive performance, with precision, recall and F1-score reaching 88%. Moreover, the F1 value for each pattern prediction surpasses 87%. The results of the feature importance analysis show that the early features contribute the most to the pattern prediction, followed by the information features and publisher features. Among them, the release time in the information features exhibits the most substantial contribution to the prediction outcome.

Originality/value

This study reveals the phenomena and special patterns of growth and decline, appearance and disappearance of social media emergency information popularity from the time dimension and identifies the patterns of social media emergency information popularity evolution. Meanwhile, early prediction of related patterns is made to explore the role factors behind them. These findings contribute to the formulation of social media emergency information release strategies, online public opinion guidance and risk monitoring.

Details

Aslib Journal of Information Management, vol. ahead-of-print no. ahead-of-print
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2050-3806

Keywords

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Article
Publication date: 28 September 2021

Huilin Liang and Qingping Zhang

Can Chinese social media data (SMD) be used as an alternative to traditional surveys used to understand tourists' visitation of attractions in Chinese cities? The purpose of this…

333

Abstract

Purpose

Can Chinese social media data (SMD) be used as an alternative to traditional surveys used to understand tourists' visitation of attractions in Chinese cities? The purpose of this paper is to explore this question.

Design/methodology/approach

Popular tourism SMD sources in China, such as Ctrip, Weibo and Dazhong Dianping (DZDP), were used as data source, and the relationships between these sources and traditional data sources were studied with statistical methods. Data from Shanghai were used in this study since it is rich in tourism resources and developed in information.

Findings

A systematic research method was followed and led to the following conclusions: There were positive correlations for attraction visitation between Chinese SMD and traditional survey data; Chinese SMD source could temporally indicate visits to Shanghai tourist attractions; Ctrip SMD generally performed less well than Weibo or DZDP, and different SMD performed differently depending on the specific attractions and time units in the visitation calculation process; and factors including visitation, distance from the city center and the grade of attractions might affect the prediction performance based on data from the SMD. The findings suggest that Chinese SMD could be used as a cost-efficient and reliable proxy for traditional survey data to predict Chinese attraction visitation.

Originality/value

This study applies and improves the methods of SMD reliability in attraction use studies, supplies the gap for premise, basis and foundation for the large amounts of tourism researches using SMD in China and could promote and inspire more efficient and advanced measures in tourism management and urban development.

Details

Open House International, vol. 47 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0168-2601

Keywords

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Article
Publication date: 1 September 2022

Qilan Li, Zhiya Zuo, Yang Zhang and Xi Wang

Since the opening of China (aka, reform and opening-up), a great number of rural residents have migrated to large cities in the past 40 years. Such a one-way population inflow to…

652

Abstract

Purpose

Since the opening of China (aka, reform and opening-up), a great number of rural residents have migrated to large cities in the past 40 years. Such a one-way population inflow to urban areas introduces nontrivial social conflicts between urban natives and migrant workers. This study aims to investigate the most discussed topics about migrant workers on Sina Weibo along with the corresponding sentiment divergence.

Design/methodology/approach

An exploratory-descriptive-explanatory research methodology is employed. The study explores the main topics on migrant workers discussed in social media via manual annotation. Subsequently, guided LDA, a semi-supervised topic modeling approach, is applied to describe the overall topical landscape. Finally, the authors verify their theoretical predictions with respect to the sentiment divergence pattern for each topic, using regression analysis.

Findings

The study identifies three most discussed topics on migrant workers, namely wage default, employment support and urban/rural development. The regression analysis reveals different diffusion patterns contingent on the nature of each topic. In particular, this study finds a positive association between urban/rural development and the sentiment divergence, while wage default exhibits an opposite relationship with sentiment divergence.

Originality/value

The authors combine unique characteristics of social media with well-established theories of social identity and framing, which are applied more to off-line contexts, to study a unique phenomenon of migrant workers in China. From a practical perspective, the results provide implications for the governance of urbanization-related social conflicts.

Details

Internet Research, vol. 33 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1066-2243

Keywords

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Article
Publication date: 3 July 2024

Qian Wang, Yan Wan, Feng Feng, Ziqing Peng and Jing Luo

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…

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Abstract

Purpose

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.

Design/methodology/approach

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.

Findings

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.

Originality/value

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.

Details

Kybernetes, vol. ahead-of-print no. ahead-of-print
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0368-492X

Keywords

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Article
Publication date: 18 February 2021

Cheng-Jun Wang and Jonathan J.H. Zhu

Social influence plays a crucial role in determining the size of information diffusion. Drawing on threshold models, we reformulate the nonlinear threshold hypothesis of social…

688

Abstract

Purpose

Social influence plays a crucial role in determining the size of information diffusion. Drawing on threshold models, we reformulate the nonlinear threshold hypothesis of social influence.

Design/methodology/approach

We test the threshold hypothesis of social influence with a large dataset of information diffusion on social media.

Findings

There exists a bell-shaped relationship between social influence and diffusion size. However, the large network threshold, limited diffusion depth and intense bursts become the bottlenecks that constrain the diffusion size.

Practical implications

The practice of viral marketing needs innovative strategies to increase information novelty and reduce the excessive network threshold.

Originality/value

In all, this research extends threshold models of social influence and underlines the nonlinear nature of social influence in information diffusion.

Details

Internet Research, vol. 31 no. 5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1066-2243

Keywords

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Article
Publication date: 28 April 2023

Renping Zhang, Xingyu Chen, Wei Wang and Mohsin Shafi

This study aims to explore the impact of firm-generated content (FGC) on viral marketing on multiple social media platforms, and how social ties embedded in different social media…

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Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to explore the impact of firm-generated content (FGC) on viral marketing on multiple social media platforms, and how social ties embedded in different social media platforms affect the motives for social dissemination.

Design/methodology/approach

Three studies were conducted to test the model. A quasi-field experiment (Study 1) supported this main effect. Studies 2 and 3 examined the underlying mechanism and enhanced the internal and external validity of the findings.

Findings

The findings revealed that warmth (vs competence)-oriented FGC is consistent with the communion (vs agency) mode and elicits greater social dissemination on social media embedded with strong (vs weak) ties.

Practical implications

This study illustrates that FGC that matches communication modes on multiple social media platforms embedded with different social ties will trigger viral marketing and being aware of this match is crucial for policymakers.

Originality/value

This research sheds light on the effects of FGC on viral marketing on multiple social media platforms embedded in different social ties.

Details

Journal of Consumer Marketing, vol. 40 no. 6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0736-3761

Keywords

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