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This paper aims to investigate the extent of shareholder engagement and satisfaction with corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports of a Chinese-owned company compared to an Australian-owned company in the Australian mining industry. The study is motivated by the speed, extent and nature of Chinese foreign direct investment in Australia, the resulting negative social attitudes and the impact on the perceptions of a report’s credibility.

The authors conducted a survey of 202 minority shareholders of two Australian mining companies, one has a Chinese majority shareholder and the other an Australian majority shareholder. The responses highlight users’ comparative perceptions of corporate motivations for reporting, the level of perceived shareholder power over reporting decisions and the resulting propensity to read CSR reports.

The authors found that, contrary to decision-usefulness theory, which posits that users will read CSR reports only if they are deemed to be reliable, that perceptions of poor credibility and poor CSR performance actually result in a higher propensity to read the reports. This suggests that the minority shareholders of the Chinese acquired firm are using reports to monitor the level of corporate accountability.

The findings have implications for firms operating in politically or socially sensitive industries that are likely to use CSR reporting as a legitimising strategy. The paper also provides guidance to regulators in the provision of information, which is meaningful to minority shareholders.

This paper explores how the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSARG) securitizes internal security, cultural identity and welfare system through refugee policy instruments. It also aims to explore the roles of members of the Legislative Council (Legco) and Chinese newspapers in the securitization process.

The author analyzed 6 landmark verdicts, 342 related documents of the Legco, 2,386 news coverages and 408 editorials/ column articles from 6 selected Chinese newspapers from 2005 to mid-2019. While documents of the Legco were collected from the Legco archives, news reports, editorials and column articles were gathered on Wisenews with the keywords, namely, refugees, asylum seekers, torture claims and non-refoulement claims.

The author argues that the advanced comprehensive security approach helps to comprehend the securitization process in Hong Kong. The HKSARG, Legco members of the pro-government camp and pro-government Chinese newspapers perform as securitizing actors who regard refugees as an existential threat to the referent objects, i.e. internal security, cultural identity and welfare system.

There are two significant limitations, namely, the coverage of newspapers and the absence of poll data. This paper merely selected six Chinese newspapers, which do not cover English newspapers and some other Chinese newspapers in Hong Kong. It may neglect some important data. Additionally, owing to the absence of longitudinal poll data, the author chose not to examine the related materials.

This paper intends to be the first study to provide a longitudinal examination of the transformations of current refugee policies in Hong Kong.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between participation in performance measurement systems (PMS) and the use of performance measures; the use of performance measures and managerial performance; and participation in PMS and managerial performance in public hospitals in Thailand.

Data were collected using a mailed questionnaire. A total of 304 middle managers in public hospitals in Southern Thailand participated in the study. The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The results reveal a positive relationship between participation in PMS and the use of performance measures, and a positive relationship between the use of performance measures and managerial performance. The results also indicate a positive relationship between participation in PMS and improved managerial performance.

Results indicate that top managers in hospitals should allow middle managers to have greater participation in their organization’s PMS. By sharing information between top and middle managers, a PMS can be developed that reflects the organization’s goals, as well as being suitable for departmental performance evaluation. This enhances PMS acceptance by middle managers, and reduces task ambiguity, leading to improved managerial performance.

As middle managers participate more in PMS, their acceptance of PMS increases. They then make greater use of both financial and non-financial performance measures to obtain comprehensive feedback about their department’s performance. This enhances their decision outcomes, resulting in improved managerial performance.

This paper aims to estimate the influence of HR practices and theories on organizational sustainability. The research also examines the role of innovation as a mediator among the relationship of HR practices and theories and organizational sustainability.

The research is based on the survey conducted among 386 employees of logistics firms across India. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) approaches were used for analysis. Approach proposed by Baron and Kenny (1986) was used to test the mediating effect.

The study finds that HR practices and theories have positive and significant influence on organizational sustainability. The research also reveals that after introducing innovation as a construct, it partially mediated the association of HR practices and theories and organizational sustainability.

The study inspects the extent to which innovation can acts as a mediator between the relationship of HR practices and theories and organizational sustainability in logistics sector in India, which has not been established in past studies.

Ramp meters in the Twin Cities were turned off for 8 weeks in the Fall of 2000. This paper analyzes traffic data collected in this experiment on travel time variability with and without ramp metering for several representative freeways during the afternoon peak period. Travel time variability is generally reduced with metering. However, it is found that ramp meters are particularly helpful for long trips relative to short trips. The annual benefits from reducing travel time variability with meters are estimated to be $33.1 million, compared to the annual ramp metering costs of $2.6 million in the Twin Cities metro area. Thus, the impact on travel time variability should be captured in future ramp metering benefit/cost analysis.

This chapter addresses the criticisms that escalation of commitment research has focused only on individual (as opposed to team or group) decision-making. It has been suggested that research findings of individual-based decision on managers’ escalation behaviors may not be applicable in today’s business environment which is increasingly dominated by team or group-based decision. Specifically, this chapter examines the effects of information availability (public vs. private information) and type of responsibility (sole and joint responsibility) on managers’ project evaluation decisions. A laboratory experiment was conducted to test the hypotheses developed for this study. The results indicate that, consistent with prior research, project managers exhibited a greater tendency to continue a failing project under private information than public information conditions. In addition, in the private information condition, project managers with joint responsibility for an investment project expressed a greater tendency to continue a failing project than those with sole responsibility. Implications of our results for the design of management control systems are discussed.

Physical comorbidities of alcohol misuse are common and result in frequent attendance to hospitals with estimated £3.5bn annual cost to the NHS in England. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effect of the hospital in-reach team of the Leeds Addiction Unit (LAU) in reducing hospital service utilization in people with alcohol dependence.

This is a retrospective cohort study, with a mirror-image design. The authors included all patients who had wholly alcohol attributable admission(s) to Leeds Teaching NHS Hospitals Trust (LTHT) during a four-month period between January and April 2013 and received treatment from LAU. The primary outcome measures were changes in A and E attendance (A&E) attendances, number of hospital admissions and days spent in hospital between the three months before and after the LAU intervention.

During the four-month period, there were 1,711 wholly alcohol attributable admissions related to 1,145 patients. LAU saw 265 patients out of them 49 who had wholly alcohol attributable admissions engaged in treatment with LAU. Of those who engaged 33 (67.3 per cent) had fewer A&E attendances, 34 (69.4 per cent) had fewer admissions and 39 (80 per cent) spent fewer days in hospital in the three months after compared to three months before. There was a significant reduction in total number of hospital admissions (78 vs 41, mean=1.56 vs 0.82, p<0.001) and days spent in hospital (490 vs 146, mean=9.8 vs 2.92, p<0.001).

This mirror-image study suggests that an alcohol hospital in-reach team could be effective in reducing acute hospital service utilization by engaging with the frequent attenders with alcohol misuse complications.

There have been many challenges and uncertainties in determining the future direction(s) for performance measurement (PM) in Florida public libraries over the years. Social pressures for establishing increased accountability and community needs combined with the library administrators need to respond to these pressures served as the catalysts for the need to evolve PM processes in Florida public libraries.

This study examines the effect of employees' perceptions of political connections on performance measurement systems (PMS) design choice and firm performance. In addition, this study explores the moderating effect of social networking, a very common and widely used factor by domestic and foreign multinational firms operating in China, and its joint effect with political connections or PMS design choice on firm performance. We collected survey responses from a sample of 110 managers from manufacturing firms in China. Our results reveal that highly politically connected managers use nonfinancial measures, leading to improved firm performance. Our results suggest that social networking interacts significantly with political connections, and nonfinancial and financial measures on firm performance. The theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed.