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ABSTRACTThis study analyzed the influence of rhetoric in the endorsement text on the willingness of the crowd to participate in citizen science projects. Four categories of endorsers were studied: professors, students, industrial researchers, and amateur researchers. Using 1243 endorsement texts from 543 citizen science projects as the corpus, the effects of the standalone techniques (ethos, pathos, and logos) and mixed-rhetoric techniques of persuasion were examined empirically. The results informed that pathos and logos had significant advantages over ethos. Taking a mixed-rhetoric approach to the endorsement text with a mix of pathos (55%) and logos (45%) maximized the appeal of citizen science projects, and the influence of this approach had an inverted U-shaped effect. On the identity of the endorsers, the professors, students, and amateur researchers shared a similar rhetorical approach, while the industrial researchers shared another. However, from the influence of endorsement rhetorical strategies, the impact of amateur researchers was consistent with that of the industrial researchers (both pathos and logos were positive); and professors (only logos was positive) and students (only pathos was positive) reveal some differences. Finally, endorsement rhetoric strategies exerted a greater influence on the humanities and social science projects than on the natural science projects.

Graphical Abstract:

China’s high-speed railways, as a vital channel for capital flow, have undergone substantial development over the past two decades, exerting a pivotal influence in stimulating economic growth, expediting information dissemination, and optimizing resource allocation. While high-speed rail demonstrates evident advantages across various domains, a pressing issue is how to achieve fairness in fostering widespread prosperity. Based on tournament theory and fairness theory, this study constructs two unfairness indicators at the enterprise level, namely, absolute income gap and relative income gap. The study delves into the relationship between high-speed rail and income inequality, leveraging a data set comprising Chinese A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2020. The results show that high-speed rail does not have an immediate effect but gradually narrows income gaps as service frequency increases. Moreover, transportation infrastructure and the economic environment are inseparable. We found that the impact of high-speed rail is weakened by economic uncertainty. Furthermore, this study unveils that the opening of high-speed rail and its service frequency exhibit both synergistic and complementary effects. This study not only enriches the research on the external governance of high-speed rail but also provides evidence-based measures for achieving relative fairness.

The identification of the effects of university-based entrepreneurship education has attracted increasing interest in both academic and practical communities. On the basis of integrating passion- and competency-based perspectives, this study attempted to offer a sound understanding of how university-based entrepreneurship education influences the entrepreneurial intention of university students. Based on a dataset of 1050 university students from 50 universities in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area in China, a hierarchical linear modeling analysis was performed, and the results support our hypotheses. Our research provides the first empirical evidence illustrating how, in the organizational context, university-based entrepreneurship education facilitates the shaping of future entrepreneurs from dual perspectives. The implications of our findings were discussed.

In a dynamic marketplace, new product development (NPD) is considered the pivot of an organization's competitive strategy. However, little research has been conducted on the teaching material, pedagogical approach, and learning objective that should be part of a course on NPD. The study introduces a methodology for designing a curriculum with limited prior knowledge. First, latent semantic analysis was applied to extract the main research themes from journal articles on the subject, which are considered potential teaching materials. Next, the modified Delphi method was applied to identify their eligibility as teaching materials. Finally, both a revised Bloom's taxonomy and analytic hierarchy process were applied to establish learning objectives and determine the priorities in teaching materials and pedagogical approaches, respectively. The paper presents a case study to show that the proposed methodology can induce faculties to consider student requirements, evaluate the feasibility of teaching materials and pedagogical approaches, and develop assessments with concrete learning objectives. Moreover, the study found that the pedagogical approaches of experiential learning and constructivist learning were effective for teaching innovation management, knowledge management, project management, and risk management in courses at business schools in new product development.