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Against the background of the enormous economic transition China is undertaking, government intervention over corporate behavior is a frequent and, arguably, necessary measure. Among the most serious problems facing China, economically and reputationally, are environmental issues. So, how is the government intervening in the environmental performance of Chinese enterprises? And how are Chinese enterprises responding? These are the questions to be answered in this study.

This paper sampled listed companies on China’s Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges. The data were collected from the HeXun corporate social responsibility report, CSMAR and WIND databases. A Tobit model was used to conduct the main 2SLS regression analysis, and the robustness tests followed the propensity score matching method.

The analysis shows that environmental performance is positively related to the government subsidies a company receives. The “Eight-point Regulation of the Centre” crack-down on social corruption introduced in 2012 has weakened rent-seeking overall, but rent-seeking behavior through the cloak of corporate environmental performance has become more serious. As a result, non-polluting and state-owned enterprises are significantly less concerned about their environmental performance, while polluting and private enterprises are more motivated to become good environmental citizens.

This research provides a greater understanding of the drivers behind environmentally-responsible behavior in Chinese companies. These insights can be used by policymakers and environmental regulators to incentivize a more widespread ground-swell of change across the gamut of Chinese business.

Environmental policy and practice informed by research-driven recommendations can not only make valuable contributions to the health and well-being of Chinese society but also, as a significant contributor to climate change, environmental reforms have global benefits.

This study explores the motivations behind rent-seeking associated with environmental investment. The findings expand the research horizon of relevant literature on corporate political rent-seeking and deepen the understandings of the economic consequences of corporate investment into environmental practice. The results provide empirical evidence for the Chinese government to implement environmental regulations based on incentives beyond simple profit-making.

This study aims to explore how a Chinese lesson study (LS) supports a teacher's learning of transforming curriculum reform ideas into classroom practices.

Data analyzed in this study included lesson plans, three videotaped research lessons, three audio-taped group meetings, interviews, the teacher's reflection journals and other related materials. Clarke and Hollingsworth's interconnected model of professional growth (IMPG) was adopted as the theoretical and analytical framework for examining the teacher's learning process.

This study found that teachers can deepen their understanding of innovative curriculum ideas and implement them through an iterative cycle of planning, enactment and reflection in LS. Involving knowledgeable others in the process and reflecting on evidence-based evaluation of students' learning outcomes is crucial for changing the teacher's knowledge, beliefs, attitudes and teaching practices. Theoretical tools, such as learning trajectory, are useful for transforming curriculum reform ideas that teachers find abstract and overly broad into concrete and actionable lesson designs.

Theoretically, this study can broaden our knowledge about how the under-studied mechanism of Chinese LS can contribute to helping teachers to transform reform ideas into classroom practices. Practically, this study provides suggestions for researchers and educators to reflect on and improve the effectiveness of teachers' professional development programs in a reform context.

The purpose of this study is to develop a framework for the perceived intelligence of VAs and explore the mechanisms of different dimensions of the perceived intelligence of VAs on users’ exploration intention (UEI) and how these antecedents can collectively result in the highest level of UEI.

An online survey on Amazon Mechanical Turk is employed. The model is tested utilizing the structural equation modeling (SEM) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) approach from the collected data of VA users (N = 244).

According to the SEM outcomes, perceptual, cognitive, emotional and social intelligence have different mechanisms on UEI. Findings from the fsQCA reinforce the SEM results and provide the configurations that enhanced UEI.

This study extends the conceptual framework of perceived intelligence and enriches the literature on anthropomorphism and users’ exploration. These findings also provide insightful suggestions for practitioners regarding the design of VA products.

The purpose of this paper was to map the safety management research of construction industry by scientometric analysis, which can predict important highlights and future research directions of safety management research in the construction industry. As an important issue in the construction industry, safety management issues have been researched from different perspectives. Although previous studies make knowledge contributions to the safety management research of construction industry, there are still huge obstacles to distinguish the comprehensive knowledge map of safety management research in the construction industry.

This study applies three scientometric analysis methods, collaboration network analysis, co-occurrence network analysis and cocitation network analysis, to the safety management research of construction industry. 5,406 articles were retrieved from the core collection database of the Web of Science. CiteSpace was used for constructing a comprehensive analysis framework to analyze and visualize the safety management research of construction industry. According to integrating the analysis results, a knowledge map for the safety management research of construction industry can be constructed.

The analysis results revealed the academic communities, key research topics and knowledge body of safety management research in the construction industry. The evolution paths of safety management research in the construction industry were divided into three development stages: “construction safety management”, “multi-objective safety management” and “comprehensive safety management”. Five research directions were predicted on the future safety management research of construction industry, including (1) comprehensive assessment indicators system; (2) intelligent safety management; (3) cross-organization collaboration of safety management; (4) multilevel safety behavior perception and (5) comparative analysis of safety climate.

The findings can reveal the overall status of safety management research in the construction industry and represent a high-quality knowledge body of safety management research in the construction industry that accurately reflects the comprehensive knowledge map on the safety management research of construction industry. The findings also predict important highlights and future research directions of safety management research in the construction industry, which will help researchers in the safety management research of construction industry for future collaboration and work.

This study aims to assess the pitting resistance of austenitic stainless steel welded joints fusion zone (FZ) with high density of inclusions before and after surface treatment, including potentiostatic pulse technique (PPT) and pickling.

The potentiodynamic polarization tests and critical pitting temperature tests were carried out for estimating pitting resistance. The PPT and pickling were performed as surface treatment. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) and energy dispersive spectrometer were used for characterize the microstructure and elemental distribution. Electron back-scattered diffraction (EBSD) was used to assess the portion of phases and morphology of grains.

The weld metal exhibits a higher degree of alloying compared to the base metal, and it contains d-phase and sulfur-containing inclusions. Sulfur-containing inclusions serve as initiation sites for pitting, and they diminish the pitting resistance of weld metal. Both PPT and pickling can remove sulfur-containing inclusions, but PPT causes localized dissolution of the weld metal matrix around the inclusions, while pickling does not. Because of the high density of inclusions, certain pits initiated by PPT are significantly deeper, which makes the formation of stable pitting easier. Because of the high density of inclusions, certain pits initiated by the PPT are deeper. This characteristic facilitates the progression of these initial defects into fully developed, stable pits.

Analysis of pitting initiation in shielded metal arc welding FZ with PPT and ex situ SEM tracking observation. Explanation of why the PPT surface treatment is not able to enhance the pitting resistance of stainless steel with a high inclusion density.

From practical perspectives and to improve the working efficiency, trolley transportation and payload hoisting/lowering should be simultaneously controlled. Moreover, in practical crane applications, the transportation time is an important criterion for improving transportation efficiency. Based on these requirements, this paper aims to solve positioning and antiswing control problems and shorten the transportation time for underactuated varying-rope-length overhead cranes.

By choosing trolley acceleration and varying-rope-length acceleration as system inputs, the crane system dynamic model is converted into an equivalent model without linearizing/approximating. Then, based on the converted model and system state constraints, a time-optimal problem is formulated. Further, the original problem is converted into an optimization problem with algebraic constraints which can be conveniently solved. Finally, by solving the optimization problem, the optimal trajectories of system states, including displacements, velocities and accelerations, are obtained.

This paper first provides a nonlinear time-optimal trajectory planner for varying-rope-length overhead cranes, which achieves accurate and fast trolley positioning and eliminates payload residual swings. Meanwhile, all system states satisfy the given constraints during the entire process. Hardware experimental results show that the proposed time-optimal planner is effective and has better performance compared with existing methods.

This paper proposes a time-optimal trajectory planner for overhead crane systems with hoisting/lowering motion. The proposed planner achieves fast trolley positioning and eliminates payload residual swing with all the system states being constrained within given scopes. The planner is presented based on the original nonlinear system dynamics without linearization/approximation.

The existing research rarely explains the value of authoritarian leadership in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The purpose of this study is to explore how authoritarian leadership facilitates employee followership behaviors of the SMEs in China by considering the moderating effects of cooperative goal interdependence and leader behavioral integrity.

This research tested hypotheses with a two-wave survey from a sample of 258 respondents from SMEs in China. Hypotheses are tested using hierarchical regression analyses.

Findings of the study have indicated the instrumental function of authoritarian leadership in facilitating employee followership behavior in SMEs. In particular, this study shows that the influence of authoritarian leadership on followership behavior was positively related when employees have high cooperative goal interdependence with authoritarian leaders, and when employees perceive a leader's high behavioral integrity.

The study will help SMEs to understand that authoritarian leadership should seek optimal levels of cooperative goals with employees and integrate achievement goals into their career development strategy to enhance their followership behavior. In addition, authoritarian leadership should strive to take actions consistent with their words to guarantee the relationship between achieving goals and sharing mutual goals with employees.

The study contributes to the literature by addressing an important yet under-researched area, i.e. the effectiveness of authoritarian leadership in SMEs. Authoritarian leadership, a demanding and controlling leadership style, is often criticized by scholars. This study elaborates on a three-way interaction implied by self-determination theory in predicting followership behavior. It specifies the different roles of two situational factors (cooperative goal interdependence and leader behavior integrity) in affecting employees' followership behavior.

Despite the growing research interest in gender diversity, the presence of female executives and organizational outcomes, the relationship between female executives and employment relations outcomes remains under-researched. This study aims to examine the potential relationship between female executives and employment relations outcomes, with the gender gap as a focus.

A cross-sectional survey was used to collect data from 2,682 workers from 119 manufacturing firms in Guangdong Province, southern China.

Results show that firms with female executives are more likely to comply with labor laws and promote staff development. The association between female executives and promotion opportunities is stronger for female employees than for male employees. However, there is no significant association between female executives and employee salaries.

This research contributes to employment relations literature and extends the application of social role theory to studies of employment relations in particular societal contexts. This study also provides possible boundary conditions for the existence of queen bee behavior by using data from Chinese factories.

Today's marketing is dominated by decision-making based on artificial intelligence and machine learning. This study focuses on one semi- and unsupervised machine learning technique, generative adversarial networks (GANs). GANs are a type of deep learning architecture capable of generating new data similar to the training data that were used to train it, and thus, it is designed to learn a generative model that can produce new samples. GANs have been used in multiple marketing areas, especially in creating images and video and providing customized consumer contents. Through providing a holistic picture of GANs, including its advantage, disadvantage, ethical considerations, and its current application, the study attempts to provide business some strategical orientations, including formulating strong marketing positioning, creating consumer lifetime values, and delivering desired marketing tactics in product, promotion, pricing, and distribution channel. Through using GANs, marketers will create unique experiences for consumers, build strategic focus, and gain competitive advantages. This study is an original endeavor in discussing GANs in marketing, offering fresh insights in this research topic.