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This study aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of two-sided matching (TSM) research, an interdisciplinary field that integrates both theoretical and practical perspectives. By examining 756 research articles from the Web of Science database, this paper seeks to identify key trends, collaboration patterns and emerging research topics within the TSM domain.

The research utilizes bibliometric analysis combined with a structural topic model to analyze TSM-related articles published between January 1, 2000, and September 30, 2022. The study identifies leading subfields, journals, countries/regions and institutions based on publication volume, total citations and average citations per article. Interaction and collaboration patterns among these entities are examined through co-occurrence and coupling networks. Additionally, five major research topics are identified and explored using topic modeling and co-word networks. This hybrid knowledge mining approach better reveals the inherent structural changes in topic clusters. Topic distribution and network analysis are beneficial in capturing the attention allocation of different entities to knowledge.

The analysis reveals five prominent research topics in TSM: communication resource allocation, stable matching research, computing task assignment, TSM decision-making and market matching mechanism design. These topics represent the main directions of TSM research. The study also uncovers a shift in research focus from theoretical aspects to practical applications. Furthermore, the distribution of knowledge and interaction patterns among key entities align with the identified research trends.

This study offers a novel and detailed overview of TSM research highlighting significant trends and collaboration patterns within the field. By integrating bibliometric methods with structural topic modeling the study provides unique insights into the evolution of TSM research making it a valuable resource for both academic and professional communities.

In this chapter, rephrasing Spivak's question into ‘can subaltern children speak?’, I reorient the research on China's gigantic population of children and youths in rural migrant families towards a critical interpretative approach. Based on life history and longitudinal ethnographic interview gathered with three cases, I unpack the multiple meanings migrants' children attach to mobility in their childhood experiences. First, despite emotional difficulties, children see their parents' out-migration more as a ‘mobility imperative’ than their abandonment of parental responsibilities, which should be contextualized in China's long-term urban-biased social policies and the resultant development gaps in rural and urban societies. Second, the seemingly ‘unstable’ and ‘flexible’ mobility patterns observed in migrant families should be understood in relation to a long-term family social mobility strategy to promote children's educational achievement and future attainment. The combination of absent class politics in an illiberal society with an enduring ideology of education-based meritocracy in Confucianism makes this strategy a culturally legitimate channel of social struggle for recognition and respect for the subaltern. Last, children in migrant families are active contributors to their families' everyday organization amidst mobilities through sharing care and household responsibilities, and developing temporal and mobility strategies to keep alive intergenerational exchanges and family togetherness. The study uncovers coexisting resilience and vulnerabilities of migrants' children in their ‘doing class’ in contemporary China. It also contributes insights into our understanding of the diversity of childhoods in Asian societies at the intersection of familyhood, class dynamics and cultural politics.

In this introduction to our volume on growing up in Asian societies, we define the claim of this collection, explain the approach, and take stock of what it has been possible to achieve empirically and conceptually for the further global study of childhood and youth. Our aim was to understand and present the young generation in its intergenerational relations. The 16 studies, divided into four regional sections, show a broad spectrum of very different conditions in which this young generation lives, of expectations with which they are confronted, and of strategies for action that are open to them. And they show the overriding importance of the commitments and solidarities between different age groups across societies. We propose – in the sense of a theoretical conclusion – three concepts that should be central to the study of childhood and youth experiences: (inter)generational order, existential inequality, and voice. Whereby, the latter concept also has to take into account walls of silence. The three concepts have extended prior work of childhood and youth studies with new analytical power and empirical relevance, based on this most comprehensive collection to date on growing up in Asian societies.

This chapter presents an exploratory study of specific experiences among Central Asian grandparents who adopt and raise their firstborn grandchild as their own youngest child. The practice, referred to as ‘nebere aluu’, is deemed an ethnonational tradition of the Kyrgyz and Kazakh people and appears to be widely accepted among men and women, young and old. Drawing on in-depth interviews with grandparents themselves, I describe this phenomenon as situated within and dynamically responding to the shifting social, economic and political context of contemporary Central Asia. Drastic transformations in the everyday lives, while destabilizing and disorienting, may have supplanted nebere aluu with unique significance. Contemporary expressions of nebere aluu point to it being a complex social system of intergenerational reciprocal care, continuity and responsibility that provides a meaningful space for reconciling conflicting ideas about family, marriage, love and child-rearing. This discursive space is open for debate and negotiations and raises important questions about power and gender politics inherent to it.

As internet dividends are gradually disappearing, loyalty programs have become the panacea for monetizing traffic, attracting new customers and retaining existing customers. Improving their effectiveness has thus become key to enterprises’ market competitiveness. However, member customers’ hedonic adaptation to this relationship strategy undermines its effectiveness. Based on the hedonic adaptation theory, this study aims to analyze the process of member customers' hedonic adaptation to preferential treatment in loyalty programs and explore the boundary conditions of alleviating this effect.

This study surveyed 271 member customers in China and tested the hypothesized relationships using structural equation modeling and multigroup analysis.

Preferential treatment suffers from hedonic adaptation to member customer engagement and customer gratitude, and customer tenure is a key condition for these effects. Customer gratitude is an intermediary mechanism that explains the hedonic adaptation effect of preferential treatment to member customers engagement. In addition, the structural characteristics of loyalty programs form the boundary condition that alleviates hedonic adaptation. The authors found that high-tier and -payment strategies are more likely to mitigate hedonic adaptation of preferential treatment to customer gratitude.

This study elucidates the factors that influence the effectiveness of preferential treatment and provides constructive insights into customer relationship management and for improving enterprise performance.

This contribution explores intergenerational relations and negotiations in Viet-German families. Due to family members' diverging socialization experiences in Vietnam and Germany as well as social ties in both societies, we assume that different ideas of intergenerational relations and mutual obligations may be found in Viet-German families. We distinguish between interdependent and independent intergenerational patterns of solidarity. Based on interviews with young adults – the descendants of Vietnamese migrants – four thematic areas are identified, in and through the shaping of which intergenerational relations are continuously negotiated at the face of migration-related challenges. These are (1) a childhood for the future, (2) reciprocal support, (3) individualization of family members and intimization of the family and (4) boundaries against kinship and the Vietnamese community. Our analysis reveals the emergence of a new, hybrid pattern of intergenerational solidarity, for which we suggest the term “individualized interdependence.” The role of young adults in the elaboration of this new family order stands out.

This chapter examines the lifestyles of upper-middle- and upper-class return migrant parents and youth living in Bangalore, a city in southwest India. It does so by addressing the following questions: What benefits do return migrant parents see in raising their children within their country of ethnic origin? What are the experiences of youth who grow up within their country of ethnic origin? I answer these questions by analysing 95 conversations with return migrant parents and their children, as well as alumni of Bangalore-based high schools. Building upon literature related to parenting, social class and racial-ethnic socialisation, I discuss parents' efforts to produce children who have the skills needed to succeed within the twenty-first-century global economy, and how the youth experience these child-rearing practices.

This paper describes the parent–child relationships of upper-middle-class Chinese parents and their adolescent children who were “parachuted” to the United States for private high schools. With parents remaining in China and children in the United States, thousands of miles away, such a transnational educational arrangement complicates the already volatile parent–child relationships during the adolescent years. Through ethnographic interviews of 41 students and 33 parents, I demonstrate different forms of child–parent relationships in a transnational education setting: those who found that the further physical and temporal distance has brought the parent–child relationship closer through frequent communications, children who experienced “accelerated growth” yet questioned the necessity, and delicate parent–child relationships due to increasing transnational cross-cultural or intergenerational differences. These types of parent–child relationships are not comprehensive of all the lived experiences of the “parachute generation,” yet they shed new light on transnational education and the unintended emotional dimensions of educational migration. In a transnational context for an economically well-off group, parental absence or separation of children and parents is no longer a clear-cut concept and has different layers of meanings, taking into account the frequency of communication, duration of spring and winter breaks and the existence of third-party agents such as for-profit intermediaries (or educational consultants) and host families. The diverse patterns of parent–child relations reveal the heterogeneity and complexities of “doing family” across geographic spaces and global educational hierarchies, as well as the roles of communication technologies, the tempo of mobilities and educational intermediaries.

This study aims to explore the social networks and network interactions of bed-and-breakfast (B&B) entrepreneurs in rural China. In addition, it evaluates how such network interactions relate to rural resilience.

In-depth interviews were performed in two locations: Ningbo and Dujiangyan, China. Purposive sampling was combined with snowball sampling to select interviewees. The 154 interviews involved 29 B&B owners and relevant social actors. All codes and data were analyzed using the discourse analysis framework.

The B&B owners’ social networks were identified based on strategic goals, revealing a business operation network, business development network and business citizenship network. Challenges in seeking financial support for rural B&Bs during the pandemic were specified along with network interactions. The institutional adaptation approach was used to evaluate network interaction in rural B&B business. It was argued that other networks would react based on primary network members’ goal compatibility and the effectiveness of the primary network in addressing obstacles.

This study indicates that the rural B&B entrepreneurs’ interactions with various networks could influence on business resilience, community resilience as well as rural resilience.

By combining the institutional adaptation typology with social network theory, this study generates a new typology of network interactions for rural B&Bs. The typology helps to explain how and why B&B entrepreneurs make decisions and provides a broader scope of social networks involved in these business operations.