Yang Yang, Yan Jiang and Linyue Chen
While top management teams (TMTs) play an important role in shaping firms’ strategic choices and performance outcomes, studies on green innovation have rarely considered the…
Abstract
Purpose
While top management teams (TMTs) play an important role in shaping firms’ strategic choices and performance outcomes, studies on green innovation have rarely considered the influence of the TMT demographics of firms and their suppliers. Drawing upon upper echelon theory, this study investigates the impact of buyer–supplier TMT misalignment on green innovation performance, along with potential moderators of this effect.
Design/methodology/approach
The empirical setting is Chinese-listed manufacturing firms that are present in both the Chinese Research Data Services Platform (CNRDS) database and the China Stock Market and Accounting Research (CSMAR) database. The study employs panel data regression methods on a dyadic dataset of 530 paired buyer–supplier firm-year observations over the period 2008–2019.
Findings
Buyer–supplier TMT misalignment in terms of functional background and educational level is negatively associated with buyer green innovation performance. This negative effect can, however, be mitigated by TMT tenure and long-term incentives in buyer firms.
Originality/value
By introducing the notion of TMT background misalignment to the supply chain, this study advances the understanding of relational TMT demographics in predicting organizational performance and extends upper echelon theory.
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Xiaomei Jiang, Shuo Wang, Wenjian Liu and Yun Yang
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) prescriptions have always relied on the experience of TCM doctors, and machine learning(ML) provides a technical means for learning these…
Abstract
Purpose
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) prescriptions have always relied on the experience of TCM doctors, and machine learning(ML) provides a technical means for learning these experiences and intelligently assists in prescribing. However, in TCM prescription, there are the main (Jun) herb and the auxiliary (Chen, Zuo and Shi) herb collocations. In a prescription, the types of auxiliary herbs are often more than the main herb and the auxiliary herbs often appear in other prescriptions. This leads to different frequencies of different herbs in prescriptions, namely, imbalanced labels (herbs). As a result, the existing ML algorithms are biased, and it is difficult to predict the main herb with less frequency in the actual prediction and poor performance. In order to solve the impact of this problem, this paper proposes a framework for multi-label traditional Chinese medicine (ML-TCM) based on multi-label resampling.
Design/methodology/approach
In this work, a multi-label learning framework is proposed that adopts and compares the multi-label random resampling (MLROS), multi-label synthesized resampling (MLSMOTE) and multi-label synthesized resampling based on local label imbalance (MLSOL), three multi-label oversampling techniques to rebalance the TCM data.
Findings
The experimental results show that after resampling, the less frequent but important herbs can be predicted more accurately. The MLSOL method is shown to be the best with over 10% improvements on average because it balances the data by considering both features and labels when resampling.
Originality/value
The authors first systematically analyzed the label imbalance problem of different sampling methods in the field of TCM and provide a solution. And through the experimental results analysis, the authors proved the feasibility of this method, which can improve the performance by 10%−30% compared with the state-of-the-art methods.
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This chapter examines China’s corporate governance and accounting environment that shapes the adoption of internationally acceptable principles and standards. Specifically, it…
Abstract
This chapter examines China’s corporate governance and accounting environment that shapes the adoption of internationally acceptable principles and standards. Specifically, it examines international influences, including supranational organizations; foreign investors and international accounting firms; domestic institutional influences, including the political system, economic system, legal system, and cultural system; and accounting infrastructure. China’s convergence is driven by desired efficiency of the corporate sector and legitimacy of participating in the global market. Influenced heavily by international forces in the context of globalization, corporate governance and accounting practices are increasingly becoming in line with internationally acceptable standards and codes. While convergence assists China in obtaining legitimacy, improving efficiency is likely to be adversely affected given that corporate governance and accounting in China operate in an environment that differs considerably from those of Anglo-American countries. An examination of the corporate governance and accounting environment in China suggests heavy government involvement within underdeveloped institutions. While the Chinese government has made impressive progress in developing the corporate governance and accounting environment for the market economy, China’s unique institutional setting is likely to affect how the imported concepts are interpreted and implemented.
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Stephen J. Newell, Duke Leingpibul, Bob Wu and Yang Jiang
Women in many countries are breaking through the gender barrier and are working in positions where they have a major impact on the buying and selling activities in…
Abstract
Purpose
Women in many countries are breaking through the gender barrier and are working in positions where they have a major impact on the buying and selling activities in business-to-business relationships. A number of studies have investigated the role gender plays in driving perceptions of sales representatives in the USA, however, little research has been undertaken on this important topic in China, one of the largest and most influential countries. Consequently, the purpose of this study is to examine whether the gender of both the buyer and seller, affects perceptions of expertise, trust and loyalty in business relationships.
Design/methodology/approach
A survey instrument was developed, tested and used on individuals with purchasing responsibility in China. Confirmatory factor analysis was used in the pre-test and the final study data to develop and refine measurement instruments, assessing construct validity, identifying method effects and evaluating factor variance across groups. Independent t-tests were used to compare male and female buyers on their evaluation of sales reps.
Findings
The results indicate that the gender of the sales person does not seem to be a consideration for male buyers in evaluating reps in any of the variables tested. However, female buyers consistently give less favorable evaluations to female sales people than male sales representatives. The possible implications of these findings are discussed.
Research limitations/implications
First, this research uses a quantitative methodology in both the collection and analysis of the data. Thus, future studies may want to use a qualitative data set to gain a more in-depth understanding of the business-to-business relationships between men and women in the workplace. Also, as the study was concentrated on a relatively small number of business professionals from only one area in China, subsequently researchers should consider increasing the geographic domain where respondents are sampled, to help improve the generalizability of the results.
Practical implications
The gender bias by female buyers found in this study has several important implications for businesses in China. Specifically, the suggests that female buyers may carry with them a “collective negative bias” against other women, in this case, female sales reps. The solution to this problem is not to avoid assigning female sales reps to female buyers, rather, it is to change the negative collective social-esteem identity preconceptions. Organizations can do this through training by making women aware of their own predisposition to unfairly evaluate women that they interact with in the workplace.
Originality/value
It has been argued that gender plays a small role in perceptions of sales representatives in buyer-seller relationships. While this seems to be true in the USA, it has not (until now) been empirically tested in China. Somewhat surprisingly, the gender differences we did uncover are not from male buyers in their assessments, but from female buyers in their evaluation of women sales representatives. This result provides some interesting insight into Chinese business relationships and how some women in positions of power are more critical of other women within their sphere of influence.
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Irem Demirkan, Qin Yang and Crystal X. Jiang
The purpose of this paper is to examine the current state of corporate entrepreneurship (CE) of emerging market firms (EMFs) and provide direction for future research on the topic.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the current state of corporate entrepreneurship (CE) of emerging market firms (EMFs) and provide direction for future research on the topic.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors specifically review the recent literature between the years 2000 and 2019 on CE with the keywords “corporate entrepreneurship,” “emerging economies” and “emerging countries” published in the Australian Business Deans Council list journals. The authors review the existing literature about CE in emerging markets, summarize current achievements and present an agenda for future research.
Findings
Based on the review, the authors categorized the macro and micro contexts of CE and summarized the current articles on CE in emerging markets within each macro and micro context. The authors conclude that despite the abundance of research on CE that investigates the three prongs of CE in terms of innovation, strategic renewal and new venturing in developed market contexts, there is a scarcity of literature that focuses on CE in emerging markets from a holistic perspective.
Originality/value
While there is an abundance of literature review on CE in general in terms of the drivers of the construct, the contexts contributing to it and the outcomes, the reviews are lacking about CE specifically within the context of emerging markets. Emerging markets vary from developed markets institutionally, economically, culturally, socially and technologically. However, the questions of how these differences impact the CE activities, as it relates to innovation, venturing and strategic renewal in EMFs, and how these differences provide incentives or hinder the activities that contribute to CE remain mostly unanswered. This paper reviewed the research on CE and emerging market contexts from 2000 to present. It targets to provide a better understanding of the current achievement on this topic and what to be done in the future.
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Li Jiang, Qi Huang, Dapeng Yang, Shaowei Fan and Hong Liu
The purpose of this study is to present a novel hybrid closed-loop control method together with its performance validation for the dexterous prosthetic hand.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to present a novel hybrid closed-loop control method together with its performance validation for the dexterous prosthetic hand.
Design/methodology/approach
The hybrid closed-loop control is composed of a high-level closed-loop control with the user in the closed loop and a low-level closed-loop control for the direct robot motion control. The authors construct the high-level control loop by using electromyography (EMG)-based human motion intent decoding and electrical stimulation (ES)-based sensory feedback. The human motion intent is decoded by a finite state machine, which can achieve both the patterned motion control and the proportional force control. The sensory feedback is in the form of transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) with spatial-frequency modulation. To suppress the TENS interfering noise, the authors propose biphasic TENS to concentrate the stimulation current and the variable step-size least mean square adaptive filter to cancel the noise. Eight subjects participated in the validation experiments, including pattern selection and egg grasping tasks, to investigate the feasibility of the hybrid closed-loop control in clinical use.
Findings
The proposed noise cancellation method largely reduces the ES noise artifacts in the EMG electrodes by 18.5 dB on average. Compared with the open-loop control, the proposed hybrid closed-loop control method significantly improves both the pattern selection efficiency and the egg grasping success rate, both in blind operating scenarios (improved by 1.86 s, p < 0.001, and 63.7 per cent, p < 0.001) or in common operating scenarios (improved by 0.49 s, p = 0.008, and 41.3 per cent, p < 0.001).
Practical implications
The proposed hybrid closed-loop control method can be implemented on a prosthetic hand to improve the operation efficiency and accuracy for fragile objects such as eggs.
Originality/value
The primary contribution is the proposal of the hybrid closed-loop control, the spatial-frequency modulation method for the sensory feedback and the noise cancellation method for the integrating of the myoelectric control and the ES-based sensory feedback.
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Xiaoyan Wang, Jiaxin Zhang, Yang Jiang, Jinmei Du, Dagang Miao and Changhai Xu
This paper aims to determine the most practically applicable color-difference formula for yarn-dyed fabrics woven from warp and weft yarns in different color depths and to…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to determine the most practically applicable color-difference formula for yarn-dyed fabrics woven from warp and weft yarns in different color depths and to establish color-difference tolerance for perceptibility by evaluating yarn-dyed fabrics visually and instrumentally.
Design/methodology/approach
A total of 108 sample pairs were evaluated by a panel of 13 observers with perceptibility method under three typical light sources (A, D65 and cool white fluorescent). The data sets were statistically analyzed by the homogeneity of variance test (F-test), analysis of variance, standardized residual sum of squares and performance factor/3.
Findings
Light sources had a slight influence on the visual assessments of yarn-dyed fabrics. Among the eight color-difference formulae for measurements of yarn-dyed fabrics, CIEDE2000(2:1:1) outperformed all other tested formulae, and the color tolerance for the perceptibility of CIEDE2000(2:1:1) was 0.62. When the homochromy index (K) of warp and weft yarns of yarn-dyed fabric was lower than 1.25, the color difference based on ΔE*00(2:1:1) between the two samples was acceptable in terms of the color tolerance for perceptibility (i.e. 0.62).
Practical implications
The warp and weft yarns in different color depths could be woven in fabric with a relatively uniform color appearance.
Originality/value
This study could contribute to cost savings by reusing disqualified dyed yarns during the weaving manufacturing process.
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Hong Liu, Dapeng Yang, Li Jiang and Shaowei Fan
– The purpose of this paper is to present a five-fingered, multisensory prosthetic hand integrating both intuitive myoelectric control and sensory feedback.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present a five-fingered, multisensory prosthetic hand integrating both intuitive myoelectric control and sensory feedback.
Design/methodology/approach
The artificial hand’s palm has a three-arcuate configuration and the thumb can move along a cone surface, improving the resemblance with the biological hand. By using a coupling linkage mechanism, each finger is independently actuated by a direct current motor. Both torque and position sensors are embedded in the finger to sense the hand’s status and its interaction with the outer environment. The proposed human-in-the-loop control system consists of an internal motion control scheme and an external human–machine interface. The pattern recognition-based electromyography (EMG) control scheme is adopted to control the motion of the hand, and the transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) is utilized to feedback the hand’s sensory information to its user.
Findings
The hand prototype shows that it has an anthropomorphic appearance (85 per cent to an average human hand), low weight (420 g), great power (10 N on the fingertip) and eligible dexterity. Clinical evaluation of the prosthetic hand on transradial amputees also approves the hand design.
Originality/value
From a systematic view, the paper details the design concepts of the HIT–DLR prosthetic hand IV, especially on its appearance, mechanism, myoelectric control and sensory feedback.
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Yongxing Guo, Min Chen, Li Xiong, Xinglin Zhou and Cong Li
The purpose of this study is to present the state of the art for fiber Bragg grating (FBG) acceleration sensing technologies from two aspects: the principle of the measurement…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to present the state of the art for fiber Bragg grating (FBG) acceleration sensing technologies from two aspects: the principle of the measurement dimension and the principle of the sensing configuration. Some commercial sensors have also been introduced and future work in this field has also been discussed. This paper could provide an important reference for the research community.
Design/methodology/approach
This review is to present the state of the art for FBG acceleration sensing technologies from two aspects: the principle of the measurement dimension (one-dimension and multi-dimension) and the principle of the sensing configuration (beam type, radial vibration type, axial vibration type and other composite structures).
Findings
The current research on developing FBG acceleration sensors is mainly focused on the sensing method, the construction and design of the elastic structure and the design of a new information detection method. This paper hypothesizes that in the future, the following research trends will be strengthened: common single-mode fiber grating of the low cost and high utilization rate; high sensitivity and strength special fiber grating; multi-core fiber grating for measuring single-parameter multi-dimensional information or multi-parameter information; demodulating equipment of low cost, small volume and high sampling frequency.
Originality/value
The principle of the measurement dimension and principle of the sensing configuration for FBG acceleration sensors have been introduced, which could provide an important reference for the research community.