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This study aims to examine an emerging product–place co-branding marketing practice in China’s rural areas. The role of this practice in inclusive development is analyzed from the perspectives of value proposition innovation, market legitimacy, media coverage and brand value. Both research and practice indicate value proposition innovation to exert an important influence on brand value enhancement, but little is known about the mediating and moderating mechanisms underlying this relation.

A moderated mediation model is constructed to examine whether market legitimacy mediates the relationship between value proposition innovation and brand value. vWhether this mediating process is moderated by media coverage is also examined. The primary data are collected from semi-structured interviews and observations conducted with two common cases to develop proper scales for value proposition innovation and market legitimacy. The research includes 100 product–place co-brandings published by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs in 2019. Hypotheses are tested using hierarchical regression and a Bootstrap model.

Value proposition innovation has a positive effect on brand value, and market legitimacy partially mediates this relationship. Media coverage positively moderates the relationship between value proposition innovation and market legitimacy, and positively moderates the mediating effect of market legitimacy; the higher the media coverage, the stronger the mediating effect of market legitimacy.

Based on data availability and accessibility, the study sample focused on indicators from 100 brands in 2019. If the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs discloses consecutive annual information for other years, future studies could explore panel data to further test the study’s conclusions from a longitudinal perspective.

First, this paper adds to the emerging literature on product–place co-branding business models by examining the relationship between value proposition innovation and brand value. Second, this paper enriches institutional theory by including market legitimacy as a mediator between value proposition innovation and brand value. Third, this paper identifies the moderating role of media coverage, thus broadening the theoretical implications of institutional theory with respect to improving market legitimacy.

Firms report varied levels of success in relation to using alliances to aid in new product development (NPD). This study aims to investigate internal processes that might influence the experience of alliance success. Specifically, this study investigates the role of mediating and moderating mechanisms underlying the alliance orientation (AO)–new product success relationship, while also investigating the impact of the level and consistency of AO. The primary goal is to understand the importance of a firm’s maintaining a consistent focus upon alliance scanning, coordination and learning.

A survey was conducted to collect data from 141 Taiwanese electronics companies. The proposed model and hypotheses were tested using path analysis in analysis of moment structures.

AO improves the success of new products indirectly through the enhancement of product program innovativeness and NPD decision-making flexibility. The positive effect of AO on product program innovativeness and NPD decision-making flexibility is heightened when a firm consistently carries out a series of alliance management activities, including alliance scanning, coordination and learning. Market turbulence and the intensity of competition differentially affect the association between product program innovativeness and NPD decision-making flexibility and new product success.

The measures were self-reported and may result in the threat of common method bias. While this study focused upon protecting against and assessing this bias, collecting data from multiple sources would have helped to eliminate the bias. Further, the sample consisted of Taiwanese electronics firms. This makes it difficult to generalize this study’s findings to other industrial contexts.

While AO may be viewed as a dynamic capability, product program innovativeness and NPD decision-making flexibility represent competitive advantage in NPD program and process, respectively. Managers should not focus only on competitive advantage in NPD while overlooking the development of dynamic capabilities, as this study’s results demonstrate that both elements must work in tandem. AO is relevant at higher levels of the organizational hierarchy, while product program innovativeness and decision-making flexibility are operational, demanding cross-functional coordination and involvement within a firm. Senior executives ought to not only confirm the appropriate provision of their resources to activities and actions associated with product program innovativeness and decision-making flexibility in NPD but also continually monitor and assess whether the inputs of AO lead to desirable competitive advantage in the context of NPD.

This study sheds light on the underlying mechanism through which AO improves new product success. This research proposes two different aspects of AO, level and consistency, and empirically identifies their interactive effect in the context of NPD. The findings offer specific guidelines for the assessment and implementation of AO to improve new product success. Consistency, especially, has not been investigated in relation to alliance-generated new product success.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of collective teacher efficacy, academic press and faculty trust, all of which are components of academic optimism (AO), in predicting school innovation. In addition, the authors explored the extent to which faculty trust mediates the association between collective teacher efficacy and academic press with school innovation.

In all, 1,009 teachers from 79 schools in Northern Israel completed anonymous questionnaires about AO and innovation. Aggregation, descriptive statistics, bivariate correlation analyses and mediation analysis were performed to analyze the data.

Results showed that the components of AO, i.e., collective teacher efficacy, academic press and trust, were positively correlated to school innovation, and that trust mediated the relationship between collective teacher efficacy and school innovation. The study results confirmed that AO holds a significant predictive value in school innovation and highlights the importance of trust in supporting innovation.

As school leaders are challenged to foster innovative new practices in their schools, the findings suggest that they will need to know how to cultivate collective teacher efficacy, academic press and faculty trust.

This is the first study to examine the role of the components of AO in predicting innovation. By using a robust sample, the authors were able to examine the proposed school-level model with respect to the factors that affect school innovation. Originality also lies in the organizational approach to educational innovation in relation to faculty’s beliefs and behaviors.

This paper is a study of the current trends and conditions of electronic resources for Chinese studies, based on a recent survey on the Internet of 29 Chinese libraries in North America and eight Chinese libraries in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The survey discussed current electronic resources for Chinese studies, with a union list of major Chinese language databases currently used in libraries in Asia and the US. Current views on the use and development of electronic resources for Chinese studies were summarised.

This paper aims to collect and compile the historical data of Guanfu Salt Farm, officially built by the Song Dynasty (960–1279) within modern Hong Kong territories, to reconstruct its history for the reflection of Hong Kong society of the time.

This paper is largely based on identification and analysis of historical documents, including keyword search on electronic databases and verification with the original sources, with reference to archaeological findings when necessary.

This paper reconstructs the history of Guanfu Salt Farm based on documentary sources with reference to archaeological findings. English translation of Chinese sources is also provided when necessary.

There has been an absence of systematic compilation of historical data of Hong Kong during the Song Dynasty, which are limited in quantity and scattered across different sources. This paper seeks to fill the vacuum of knowledge about pre-colonial Hong Kong, with a more comprehensive reconstruction of the history of Guanfu Salt Farm.

This study aims to assess the oxidative stability of avocado oil (AO) at various temperatures, using butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) as an artificial antioxidant and different concentrations of ultrasonic extract of Chlorella vulgaris.

Extracts of C. vulgaris were obtained using four solvents: water, acetone, ethanol and 80% ethanol-aqueous. Standard techniques were used to conduct qualitative phytochemical screening of the extracts. The extracted samples were analyzed for total phenolics, total flavonoids, antioxidant activity and phenolic compound fractionation. Some physicochemical parameters of AO treated with various concentrations of C. vulgaris ultrasonic extract compared to a 200 ppm BHT and exposed to different temperatures were measured.

The highest phenolic, flavonoids content and antioxidant activity was achieved by 80% ethanolic extract of C. vulgaris . The results showed that exposure of AO to high temperatures led to significant changes in the oil's physicochemical properties. These changes increased as the temperature increased. On the other hand, adding 80% ethanolic extract of C. vulgaris into AO reduced the effect of heat treatment on the change in physicochemical properties.

Adding 80% ethanolic extract of C. vulgaris into AO can potentially reduce the impact of heat treatment on the alteration of physicochemical properties.

The Communist revolution in China has led to the appearance in this country of increasing numbers of Chinese books in Russian translation. The Chinese names in Cyrillic transcription have presented many librarians and students with a new problem, that of identifying the Cyrillic form of a name with the customary Wade‐Giles transcription. The average cataloguer, the first to meet the problem, has two obvious lines of action, and neither is satisfactory. He can save up the names until he has a chance to consult an expert in Chinese. Apart altogether from the delay, the expert, confronted with a few isolated names, might simply reply that he could do nothing without the Chinese characters, and it is only rarely that Soviet books supply them. Alternatively, he can transliterate the Cyrillic letters according to the system in use in his library and leave the matter there for fear of making bad worse. As long as the writers are not well known, he may feel only faintly uneasy; but the appearance of Chzhou Ėn‐lai (or Čžou En‐laj) upsets his equanimity. Obviously this must be entered under Chou; and we must have Mao Tse‐tung and not Mao Tsze‐dun, Ch'en Po‐ta and not Chėn' Bo‐da. But what happens when we have another . . . We can hardly write Ch'en unless we know how to represent the remaining elements in the name; yet we are loth to write Ch'en in one name and Chėn' in another.

The Euler beam theory is used to study the dynamic stability of a composite material slider‐crank mechanism with an elastic connecting rod. The Ritz finite element procedure is applied to derive the governing equations of motion of the mechanism. Based on the assumption that the slider‐crank mechanism is subjected to a sinusoidal input torque and the operation condition is at a steady dynamic state, the governing equations represent a system of second order differential equations with periodic coefficients of the Mathieu‐Hill type. Making use of the Bolotin method, the boundaries between stable and unstable solutions of the elastic connecting rod are constructed. The advantages of using composite materials in the design of mechanisms are demonstrated.

This study aims to empirically study the effect of process constraints and the combinative effects of different constraints on enterprise digital transformation.

This paper selects the World Bank's business environment survey of Chinese enterprises in 2012 as the research sample to empirically study the effect of process constraints and different kinds of constraints on enterprise digital transformation.

The authors find that process constraints have an inverted U-shaped effect on enterprise digital transformation and that employee digital literacy plays an intermediary role in this process. That is, process constraints have a too-much-of-a-good-thing effect on employees' digital literacy, which further affects enterprise digital transformation. The increase in the number of input and output constraints will make the inverted U-shaped relationship between the process constraint and digital transformation steeper.

The constraints faced by enterprises are everywhere and of many kinds. This paper not only discusses the influence of process constraints on enterprise digital transformation but also analyzes the interactive influence of different kinds of constraints on enterprise digital transformation and explores its micromechanism. This approach is helpful for enterprise managers in thinking about how to make full use of different kinds of constraints to activate the power of enterprise digital transformation, regard constraints as challenges and opportunities, and use them to stimulate the ability to improve the resource integration and utilization.

This study aims to present the value trace problem (VTP) for Python programming self-study, by extending the works for Java programming learning assistant system. In total, 130 VTP instances are generated using Python codes in textbooks and websites that cover basic/advanced grammar topics, fundamental data structures and algorithms and two common library usages. Besides, assisting references on Python programming topics related to the VTP instances are introduced to assist novice learners in solving them efficiently.

PyPLAS offers the VTP to study grammar topics and library usage through code reading. A VTP instance asks a learner to trace the actual values of important variables or output messages in the given source code. The correctness of any answer is checked through string matching.

The applications to 48 undergraduate students in Myanmar and Indonesia confirm the validity of the proposal in Python programming self-studies by novice learners.

The applications to 48 undergraduate students in Myanmar and Indonesia confirm the validity of the proposal in Python programming self-studies by novice learners.