From dilemmatic struggle to legitimized indifference: Expatriates’ host country language learning and its impact on the expatriate-HCE relationship

We address the lack of knowledge concerning the role of host country languages in multinational corporations based on an inductive qualitative study involving 70 interviews with Nordic expatriates and host country employees (HCE) in China. Building on the strongly discrepant views of expatriates and HCEs, we demonstrate how expatriates’ willingness to learn and use the host country language lead to different types of expatriate-HCE relationships, ranging from harmonious to distant or segregated. In doing so, we emphasize the subtle and fragile connection between expatriates’ attitude towards HCEs’ mother tongue and trust formation in addition to the construction of superiority-inferiority relationships.     

Language,knowledge transfer and firm’s strategic assets: the strategic role of language in knowledge transfer to China

This article is intended to examine the exact role of language in intra-firm cross-country knowledge transfer from the perspective of developing firm’s strategic assets. We find that inadequate language ability can lead to communication failures and cultural misunderstanding, and has the potential to destroy the process of knowledge transfer. Hence, language is not an operational issue but of strategic importance to the transfer of knowledge within multinational enterprises. As language ability is uniquely related to the specific technical, managerial and cultural aspects of a firm, hard to substitute and imitate, it should be regarded as one of the firm’s strategic assets and be dealt at strategic level.     

Comparing automated text classification methods

Online social media drive the growth of unstructured text data. Many marketing applications require structuring this data at scales non-accessible to human coding, e.g., to detect communication shifts in sentiment or other researcher-defined content categories. Several methods have been proposed to automatically classify unstructured text. This paper compares the performance of ten such approaches (five lexicon-based, five machine learning algorithms) across 41 social media datasets covering major social media platforms, various sample sizes, and languages. So far, marketing research relies predominantly on support vector machines (SVM) and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). Across all tasks we study, either random forest (RF) or naive Bayes (NB) performs best in terms of correctly uncovering human intuition. In particular, RF exhibits consistently high performance for three-class sentiment, NB for small samples sizes. SVM never outperform the remaining methods. All lexicon-based approaches, LIWC in particular, perform poorly compared with machine learning. In some applications, accuracies only slightly exceed chance. Since additional considerations of text classification choice are also in favor of NB and RF, our results suggest that marketing research can benefit from considering these alternatives.     

消解城乡二元结构的政治意蕴

城乡二元结构的长期存在造成了许多社会、经济和政治问题,随着时代的发展,城乡二元结构造成的深层次矛盾日益凸显。进入新世纪,我国总体上进入以工促农、以城带乡的发展阶段,城乡经济社会发展一体化的新格局正在逐渐形成。城乡二元结构的日益消解对于中国的现代化进程、对于中国政治发展以及对于和谐社会的构建必将具有关键性的政治意义。     

日语学习者写作能力培养的影响因素及策略

日语学习者写作能力的培养一直是日语教育者比较关注的问题,因为此项教学需要长时间的训练才能体现教学效果,所以日语学习者往往对其学习兴趣较低,教学效果也不甚明显。文章总结了笔者在实际教学中调查分析得出的写作能力培养的影响因素,并探讨了文化背景知识的影响,提出了改善教学方法的策略。     

产业链内涵及结构分析

基于理论融合的观点,通过对专家的研究进行剖析,从不同的角度来理解产业链的内涵,并对产业链的结构进行分析,为相关研究提供一个合理的理论分析框架。     

怎样培养大学生的英语自学能力

英语听,说,读,写,译等实用技能的提高需要投入大量的时间和精力,而对于大学生来说,每周英语课堂上几个有限的课时根本起不了很大的作用。因此,在本文中,作者就大学生应提高英语自学能力提出了一些意见和建议。     

论教学艺术

教学艺术是教师在教学中,能够使学生高效率地接受、消化知识的各种技能。本文主要论及教学组织艺术、教学表达艺术和教学感染力艺术三个方面。     

如何用C语言开发CAD应用软件

为了促进用C语言开发CAD应用软件在机械设计、工程分析、化学工程等领域的应用,在此通过实例简单介绍了AutoCADR12forWindows版本ADS应用程序开发环境以及如何用ADSC语言开发CAD应用软件的方法,包括应用程序的创建、加载和执行等。     

以提高表达能力为核心的蒙生汉语语用教学新模式探索

汉语课程是民族教育的基础课程,也是促进民族教育质量的主要推力。针对语际语境和民族文化语境双重影响下的蒙古族学生汉语表达缺陷,研究并应用以表达为核心的汉语语用教学方法尤为重要。本文就蒙生语用方面的问题,从文化词语分析、设计教学情境、布置相应课程模块等方面探讨构建新教学方法和模式。