Assessment of Consumer Behavior Towards Environmental Responsibility: A Structural Equations Modeling Approach

This paper analyses the factors impacting consumer environmental responsibility using a structural equation modeling approach. Consumer environmental responsibility is the intention of a person to act towards remediation of environmental problems not as an individual user with economic interests but as a responsible citizen having concerns about the social and environmental wellbeing of society. Therefore, awareness of environmental problems and knowledge of remedial alternatives will help individuals to pursue their chosen action and bolster a genuine desire to act and determine the measures for alleviation of environmental challenges. The four dimensions of an environmentally responsible consumer – opinion and beliefs, willingness, awareness, and an ability to act – are analysed. During the analysis, the dimension of ‘ability to move’ is found to be critical, because it has a direct influence on the capacity of the consumer to act. This research is intended to guide policy‐ and decision‐makers of regulatory bodies in understanding consumer behavior towards improving environmental performance index. It also helps organizational managers to make their supply chains green, and competitive, which in turn improves brand image and overall organizational performance. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

管理信息系统教学方法改革探讨

《管理信息系统》是一门集管理科学与信息技术等多学科知识为一体的课程,作为教师如何不断优化教学内容已成为一个重要的研究课题,以管理类专业为例,从管理信息系统课程的教学目标、相关知识体系构建、教材建设、实行案例教学、实施项目驱动式教学的方法和过程方面探讨和分析了管理信息系统课程教学改革的方法。     

Tax-benefit systems and differences in aggregate labour force participation: Comparative evidence from the Czech Republic and Hungary

This paper investigates the extent to which cross-country differences in aggregate participation rates can be explained by differences in tax-benefit systems. We take the example of two countries, the Czech Republic and Hungary, which – despite a lot of similarities – differ markedly in labour force participation rates. Using comparable individual-level labour supply estimates, we simulate how the aggregate participation rate would change in one country if the other country’s tax and social welfare system were adopted. The estimation results for the two countries are quite similar, suggesting that individual preferences are essentially identical in the two countries. The simulation results show that about one-third of the difference in the participation rates of the 15–74 year-old population and more than two-thirds of the participation of the prime-age population can be explained by differences in the tax-benefit systems.     

A Dynamic Leontief Model with Non-renewable Resources

In this paper we study a generalization of the dynamic Leontief input–output model. We extend the standard dynamic Leontief model with the balance equation of non-renewable resources. Obviously, the non-renewable stocks will decrease, exploiting primary resources. In this study we examine the controllability of this extended model by taking the consumption as the control parameter. Assuming balanced growth for both consumption and production, we investigate how long these scarce resources will cover the input needs of production and how the lifetime of the system depends on the balanced growth rate and on the consumption. In doing so, we apply classic results from control theory and on eigenvalue problems in linear algebra.     

Role of culture in water resources management via sustainable social automated negotiation

Increased competitions for water resources in many regions worldwide call for cooperative approaches. The competitions are complex for humans to resolve due to numerous alternatives and different or conflicting preferences of multiple stakeholders over multiple criteria, which might even oppose desirable environmental objectives. Parties also have incomplete information about the preferences of the counterparties. Electronic negotiation, empowered by intelligent agent technology, is a combination of artificial intelligence, economics, and psychology to find beneficial joint agreements in complex paradigms such as this. This study investigates a multilateral sustainable automated negotiation among intelligent agents representing stakeholders, including the legal party ‘nature’ as one of the stakeholders. It defines decision criteria and alternatives in the framework of cultural factors, elicits preferences of the stakeholders regarding the criteria without their intervention using a multi-criteria decision-making method, prunes the solution space before starting the negotiation by recognizing a general social treaty, determines the multi-issue specific treaty by learning the stakeholders, and demonstrates bidding and acceptance strategies.     

Customer service-focused HRM systems and firm performance: evidence from the service industry in Taiwan

Abstract

This study adopts a resource-based view, attraction–selection–attrition theory and a focused approach to examine the link between service-focused human resource management (HRM) systems and firm performance. Internally, we examine employee competency as the ‘black box’ between service-focused HRM systems and firm performance. Externally, we examine the effect of the interplay of a service-focused strategy and service-focused HRM systems in predicting firm performance. We collect data from different sources (i.e. executives, human resource members, and line managers). Using a final sample included 2120 respondents from 175 firms in the service industry in Taiwan, the results show that customer service-focused employee competency transmitted 53% of the effect of customer service-focused HRM systems on firm performance. In addition, when a firm implements a less service-focused business strategy, service-focused HRM systems leads to significant improvement in firm performance. Implications for research are discussed.     

Accidental,unprepared, and unsupported: clinical nurses becoming managers

To what extent have hospitals developed their skilled clinicians to perform the administrative and human resources (HR) manager role of the ward manager? We consider this research question through an analysis of an acute hospital called ‘The Hospital’ where the executive team is aiming to adopt a form of high-performance work system (HPWS). We focus primarily on explanations in terms of conditions, rather than the personalities of individual managers, which are most powerful in shaping their behaviour. There has long been a failure of hospitals (and other employing organisations) to develop fully the skills required by employees before they become line managers. Line managers are a critical link in the high-performance chain and this study illustrates that, despite their rhetoric, hospitals may still have much potential for implementing schemes to develop nurses further to prepare them for line-manager positions and to support them after they move into such roles. We infer from this study that such hospitals may not yet have completed the journey to having HPWS. Hence, there is still much scope for such hospitals to progress and enjoy the benefits that proponents claim for HPWS.     

The adaptive approach for storage assignment by mining data of warehouse management system for distribution centres

Among distribution centre operations, order picking has been reported to be the most labour-intensive activity. Sophisticated storage assignment policies adopted to reduce the travel distance of order picking have been explored in the literature. Unfortunately, previous research has been devoted to locating entire products from scratch. Instead, this study intends to propose an adaptive approach, a Data Mining-based Storage Assignment approach (DMSA), to find the optimal storage assignment for newly delivered products that need to be put away when there is vacant shelf space in a distribution centre. In the DMSA, a new association index (AIX) is developed to evaluate the fitness between the put away products and the unassigned storage locations by applying association rule mining. With AIX, the storage location assignment problem (SLAP) can be formulated and solved as a binary integer programming. To evaluate the performance of DMSA, a real-world order database of a distribution centre is obtained and used to compare the results from DMSA with a random assignment approach. It turns out that DMSA outperforms random assignment as the number of put away products and the proportion of put away products with high turnover rates increase.     

数控机床进给伺服系统的典型故障及诊断

数控机床是典型机电一体化产品,故障出现的种类和原因很多,其中进给伺服系统故障所占比重较大,文中主要以典型的进给伺服系统故障为例,总结、分析引起伺服系统故障的原因,并提出解决的思路和办法。     

基于软能力提升的经管类MIS教学模式研究

很多学校的MIS课程存在很多问题。针对这些问题,本文从软能力提升的视角,提出了经济管理类MIS的教学模式,深入分析了如何在课程设计中着重突出培养学生的软能力。