Xiaoming He and Ao Chen
This paper aims to explore the impact of a firm’s political connections on its economic value added (EVA) performance while treating connection heterogeneity and product…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the impact of a firm’s political connections on its economic value added (EVA) performance while treating connection heterogeneity and product diversification as moderators.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on data collected from 1,143 Chinese manufacturing listed firms in China’s A-share market from 2012 to 2017, this study conducted panel data analysis to investigate proposed relationships.
Findings
The findings provide evidence that political connections promote EVA performance of enterprises and both connection heterogeneity and product diversification negatively moderate the political connections – EVA performance relationship.
Originality/value
Drawing sights from the resource-based view, this study investigates the influence of corporate political connections on EVA performance, considering contingent factors of connection heterogeneity and corporate strategy (i.e. product diversification). It, thus, contributes to the literature on political connections by providing additional evidence to explaining the inconclusive findings on the political connections–firm performance relationship and extending prior research by emphasizing the moderating roles of connection heterogeneity and corporate strategy. It also complements prior research on EVA performance by exploring its antecedents.
Details
Keywords
Xiaoming He and Lin Cui
While many studies on institutional environment have primarily focused on the influence of the host country environment, limited insights have been offered on how the different…
Abstract
Purpose
While many studies on institutional environment have primarily focused on the influence of the host country environment, limited insights have been offered on how the different dimensions of home institutions affect firm internationalization. This paper aims to fill this gap by investigating the effects of regulatory institutions at home.
Design/methodology/approach
Using country governance quality to proxy quality of regulatory institutions, this study attempts to reveal how regulatory institutions at home facilitate a multinational enterprise's (MNE's) international expansion and why the influence differs in different country clusters. Using hierarchical linear modeling and cluster analysis, proposed hypotheses were tested with a three‐year panel of 511 firms from 38 countries.
Findings
The results provide substantial support for the authors' hypotheses that MNEs with high governance quality at home are more engaged in internationalization than those with low governance quality at home. Moreover, differences in institutional effect do exist between country clusters.
Practical implications
This study provides evidence that while country differences exist, governance quality at home can facilitate MNEs' expansion into foreign markets. This finding will help managers of any MNEs to consider country‐level factors and evaluate the governance quality at home before committing resources into foreign operations.
Originality/value
Building on the institutional environment literature, this theory and results make original contributions by underscoring how the consideration of regulatory institutions at home can significantly improve understanding of institutional influence on MNEs. The findings have important implications for both international business researchers and managers of MNEs.
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Yuanxing Zhang, Zhuqi Li, Kaigui Bian, Yichong Bai, Zhi Yang and Xiaoming Li
Projecting the population distribution in geographical regions is important for many applications such as launching marketing campaigns or enhancing the public safety in certain…
Abstract
Purpose
Projecting the population distribution in geographical regions is important for many applications such as launching marketing campaigns or enhancing the public safety in certain densely populated areas. Conventional studies require the collection of people’s trajectory data through offline means, which is limited in terms of cost and data availability. The wide use of online social network (OSN) apps over smartphones has provided the opportunities of devising a lightweight approach of conducting the study using the online data of smartphone apps. This paper aims to reveal the relationship between the online social networks and the offline communities, as well as to project the population distribution by modeling geo-homophily in the online social networks.
Design/methodology/approach
In this paper, the authors propose the concept of geo-homophily in OSNs to determine how much the data of an OSN can help project the population distribution in a given division of geographical regions. Specifically, the authors establish a three-layered theoretic framework that first maps the online message diffusion among friends in the OSN to the offline population distribution over a given division of regions via a Dirichlet process and then projects the floating population across the regions.
Findings
By experiments over large-scale OSN data sets, the authors show that the proposed prediction models have a high prediction accuracy in characterizing the process of how the population distribution forms and how the floating population changes over time.
Originality/value
This paper tries to project population distribution by modeling geo-homophily in OSNs.
Details
Keywords
Dezhi Li, Huan Zhou, Shenghua Zhou, Guanying Huang, Xiaoming Ma, Yongheng Zhao, Wentao Wang and S. Thomas Ng
The study aims to pioneer an innovative approach for the evaluation of government portal websites (GPWs) by introducing an eye-tracking-based method. The research meticulously…
Abstract
Purpose
The study aims to pioneer an innovative approach for the evaluation of government portal websites (GPWs) by introducing an eye-tracking-based method. The research meticulously pinpoints and analyses the distinct usability issues and challenges that users encounter while navigating and interacting with GPWs.
Design/methodology/approach
This study devises an eye-tracking-based GPW usability evaluation approach, which focuses on the major functions (i.e. government information disclosure, government services and interactive responses) of GPWs. An Entropy Weighted Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (EW-TOPSIS) method is employed to process eye-tracking indicator results for deriving GPW usability results.
Findings
The proposed approach is demonstrated to assess the usability of 12 GPWs in pilot smart cities in China, and it is found that most GPWs have lower-than-average usability. GPWs with low usability require more cognitive load that exhibit increased fixation and saccade. The comparisons among the GPW usability results from (1) the eye-tracking experiment, (2) questionnaire surveys and (3) the ready-made performance evaluation report validate the effectiveness of eye-tracking-based GPW usability evaluation.
Originality/value
The work contributes to shifting the GPW usability evaluation approach from a subjective judgment paradigm to an objective paradigm, as well as provides implications for enhancing GPW usability, including improving search function, reducing website complexity and prioritizing user needs.
Details
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Xiaoming Zhang, Huilin Chen, Yanqin Ruan, Dongyu Pan and Chongchong Zhao
With the rapid development of materials informatics and the Semantic Web, the semantic-driven solution has emerged to improve traditional query technology, which is hard to…
Abstract
Purpose
With the rapid development of materials informatics and the Semantic Web, the semantic-driven solution has emerged to improve traditional query technology, which is hard to discover implicit knowledge from materials data. However, it is a nontrivial thing for materials scientists to construct a semantic query, and the query results are usually presented in RDF/XML format which is not convenient for users to understand. This paper aims to propose an approach to construct semantic query and visualize the query results for metallic materials domain.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors design a query builder to generate SPARQL query statements automatically based on domain ontology and query conditions inputted by users. Moreover, a semantic visualization model is defined based on the materials science tetrahedron to support the visualization of query results in an intuitive, dynamic and interactive way.
Findings
Based on the Semantic Web technology, the authors design an automatic semantic query builder to help domain experts write the normative semantic query statements quickly and simply, as well as a prototype (named MatViz) is developed to visually show query results, which could help experts discover implicit knowledge from materials data. Moreover, the experiments demonstrate that the proposed system in this paper can rapidly and effectively return visualized query results over the metallic materials data set.
Originality/value
This paper mainly discusses an approach to support semantic query and visualization of metallic materials data. The implementation of MatViz will be a meaningful work for the research of metal materials data integration.
Details
Keywords
Xiaoming Wang, Nanjun He and Xiaokang Li
Anti-epidemic Emergency Projects (AEEPs) have unique characteristics such as a short construction period, high-quality requirements, complex construction environment, many…
Abstract
Purpose
Anti-epidemic Emergency Projects (AEEPs) have unique characteristics such as a short construction period, high-quality requirements, complex construction environment, many construction participants and many uncertain affecting factors. The purpose of this paper was to propose the establishment method for the Construction Community (CC) of AEEPs (CC-AEEPs) by analyzing the management features of AEEPs, to establish the method of the Social Network Analysis (SNA) for CC-AEEPs, and to apply this method and the framework to Wuhan Huoshenshan Hospital for their verification.
Design/methodology/approach
According to the CC theory, this paper explored the member composition and the establishment method for CC-AEEPs. The optimal management factors of CC-AEEPs were proposed by combining the management features of AEEPs and the SNA method for CC-AEEPs was further established. Finally, the applicability of the method was verified through a case study, and some countermeasures for the CC-AEEP social networks were proposed.
Findings
The establishment of CC-AEEPs is an important guarantee to complete AEEPs with top speed and high quality. Ten types of CC-AEEP members all played different but irreplaceable roles in cooperative construction, among which the Government, the Contractor, and the Supervisor had outstanding performances. The SNA method could effectively analyze the complexity and cooperative relationship among the members in four aspects. The case study of Huoshenshan Hospital validated the important role of CC-AEEP and its social network in the AEEP research providing beneficial enlightenment for the cooperative optimization path of the AEEP construction participants.
Originality/value
The new establishment method for CC-AEEPs was proposed from the perspective of “cooperation among human, society, and engineering” according to the theories of the engineering sociology and the CC. In this paper, the SNA method was applied to the research on the AEEP construction for the first time and the SNA method for CC-AEEPs was purposed. The optimal management factors of CC-AEEPs and the expansion path of the CC-AEEP social networks were proposed according to the whole-process tracking of AEEPs in Wuhan.
Details
Keywords
Zeqian Wang, Chengjun Wang, Xiaoming Sun and Tao Feng
The role of inventors' creativity is crucial for technological innovation within enterprises. The mobility of inventors among different enterprises is a primary source for…
Abstract
Purpose
The role of inventors' creativity is crucial for technological innovation within enterprises. The mobility of inventors among different enterprises is a primary source for companies to acquire external knowledge. The mechanism of “learning-by-hiring” is widely recognized by companies. Therefore, it is important to determine how to allocate network resources to enhance the creativity of inventors when companies hire mobile inventors.
Design/methodology/approach
The study suggests an analytical framework that analyzes alterations in tie strength and structural holes resulting from the network embeddedness of mobile inventors as well as the effect of the interaction between these two variables on changes in inventor’s creativity after the mobility. In addition, this paper examines the moderating impact of cognitive richness of mobile inventors and cognitive distance between mobile inventors and new employers on the correlation between network embeddedness and creativity.
Findings
This study found that: (1) The increase of tie strength has a significant boost in creativity. (2) Increasing structural holes can significantly improve the creativity of mobile inventors. (3) When both the tie strength and the structural holes increase, the creativity of the mobile inventors significantly increases. (4) It is important to note that when there is a greater cognitive distance, stronger tie strength promotes the creativity of mobile inventors. Additionally, cognitive richness plays a significant role in moderating the relationship between changes in structural holes and the creativity of mobile inventors.
Originality/value
These findings provide theoretical guidance for firms to effectively manage mobile inventors and optimize collaborative networks within organizations.
Details
Keywords
Zhuoxuan Jiang, Chunyan Miao and Xiaoming Li
Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of massive open online courses (MOOCs). With more and more courses being produced by instructors and being participated by…
Abstract
Purpose
Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of massive open online courses (MOOCs). With more and more courses being produced by instructors and being participated by learners all over the world, unprecedented massive educational resources are aggregated. The educational resources include videos, subtitles, lecture notes, quizzes, etc., on the teaching side, and forum contents, Wiki, log of learning behavior, log of homework, etc., on the learning side. However, the data are both unstructured and diverse. To facilitate knowledge management and mining on MOOCs, extracting keywords from the resources is important. This paper aims to adapt the state-of-the-art techniques to MOOC settings and evaluate the effectiveness on real data. In terms of practice, this paper also tries to answer the questions for the first time that to what extend can the MOOC resources support keyword extraction models, and how many human efforts are required to make the models work well.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on which side generates the data, i.e instructors or learners, the data are classified to teaching resources and learning resources, respectively. The approach used on teaching resources is based on machine learning models with labels, while the approach used on learning resources is based on graph model without labels.
Findings
From the teaching resources, the methods used by the authors can accurately extract keywords with only 10 per cent labeled data. The authors find a characteristic of the data that the resources of various forms, e.g. subtitles and PPTs, should be separately considered because they have the different model ability. From the learning resources, the keywords extracted from MOOC forums are not as domain-specific as those extracted from teaching resources, but they can reflect the topics which are lively discussed in forums. Then instructors can get feedback from the indication. The authors implement two applications with the extracted keywords: generating concept map and generating learning path. The visual demos show they have the potential to improve learning efficiency when they are integrated into a real MOOC platform.
Research limitations/implications
Conducting keyword extraction on MOOC resources is quite difficult because teaching resources are hard to be obtained due to copyrights. Also, getting labeled data is tough because usually expertise of the corresponding domain is required.
Practical implications
The experiment results support that MOOC resources are good enough for building models of keyword extraction, and an acceptable balance between human efforts and model accuracy can be achieved.
Originality/value
This paper presents a pioneer study on keyword extraction on MOOC resources and obtains some new findings.
Details
Keywords
Xiaoming Han, He Zhang and Kangjian Yang
This study aims to investigate the temperature rise characteristics of vibrating rolling bearings under the influence of the polarization force of unbalanced eccentric blocks. A…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to investigate the temperature rise characteristics of vibrating rolling bearings under the influence of the polarization force of unbalanced eccentric blocks. A thermal-fluid-solid mechanics coupled finite element model is established to analyze the effects of different loads and rotational speeds on bearing temperature to prevent overheating, wear and thermal damage.
Design/methodology/approach
A thermal-fluid-solid mechanics coupled finite element model of the vibrating rolling bearing is developed based on the principles of heat transfer. Finite element analysis software is used to conduct numerical simulations and study the temperature distribution of the bearing system under different loads and speeds. The model’s accuracy is verified by experimentally measuring the actual temperature of the bearing under the same working conditions.
Findings
This study successfully established a thermal-fluid-solid mechanics coupled finite element model of a vibrating rolling bearing, verifying its accuracy and reliability. The research results provide an essential reference for optimizing bearing design, preventing overheating and extending service life.
Research limitations/implications
By analyzing the temperature rise characteristics under various load and rotational speed conditions, the law governing the internal temperature distribution of bearings is revealed. This finding offers a theoretical foundation for comprehending the thermal behavior of bearings.
Practical implications
This study offers a scientific foundation for the maintenance and fault diagnosis of shaker rolling bearings, aiding in the timely identification and resolution of thermal damage issues. Through the optimization of bearing design and usage conditions, the equipment’s lifespan can be prolonged, maintenance expenses can be minimized and production efficiency can be enhanced.
Originality/value
A thermal-fluid-solid mechanics coupled finite element model of a vibrating rolling bearing was established, considering the interaction of multiple physical fields. The influence of the polarization force from the unbalanced eccentric block on the bearing temperature is analyzed in detail, which is close to the actual working conditions.
Peer review
The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/ILT-10-2024-0396/