Search

Employees are critical stakeholders for an organization because they directly deal with the end-users and represent the entire firm. To recognize the strategic importance of the employees, organizations create communication programs to keep employees apprised of organizational issues. In this regard, this study examined the role of communication strategies (i.e., information flow, information adequacy, and information feedback) on organizational commitment. The study also investigated the mediating effect of faculty engagement between communication strategies and organizational commitment. Self-administered survey aided in acquiring data from276 English language teachers in China. The analysis of the data was conducted using SmartPLS through the Structured Equation Modeling technique. The outcome of the study demonstrated that information flow and information feedback significantly impact organizational commitment and faculty engagement. The analysis also revealed that information adequacy significantly impacts organizational commitment but has no relationship with faculty engagement. The mediation analysis demonstrated that faculty engagement mediated the relationship between information flow and organizational commitment and between information feedback and organization commitment. However, faculty engagement did not mediate the relationship between information adequacy and organizational commitment among English language teachers in China. In theoretical terms, the study contributed in terms of incorporating different communication strategies and examining their effect on organizational commitment and faculty engagement. In practical terms, this study would be beneficial for the management of the educational institutes to develop different ways of enhancing communication strategies within the institute. This study also provided directions for the future, for example, conducting the study on other subject teachers, increasing the sample, carrying out the research in a different context, and adding different mediators and moderators in the existing model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates linear and nonlinear price information flows between the Chinese Stock Index 300 (CSI300) and futures market using high-frequency data and their wavelet transformed series for three regimes for which stock short-selling restrictions in China are different. Empirical results generally indicate information feedback between these two markets regardless of assumptions of linear and nonlinear causality and regimes for original series and wavelet transformed data at different scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With rapid economic development over the last few decades, Mainland China has emerged as a crucial role in the global markets. One might wonder whether Mainland China could serve as an international center and exhibit significant influences over the neighboring markets. Particularly, the Hong Kong and Taiwan markets, being geographically near and culturally close to China, are supposed to be deeply influenced. Utilizing trivariate BEKK (Baba, Engle, Kraft, and Kroner)-GARCH (Generalized Auto Regressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity) modes, the study attempts to investigate the trilateral relationship among these markets during the 2000-2012 period from the perspective of information transmission. The findings indicate that the Mainland China stock market significantly affected the Hong Kong and Taiwan markets through volatility spillover effects during the sample period. Accordingly, the Mainland China stock market is found to play a leading role in information transmission. Moreover, this study utilizes the BEKK-GARCH model to depict conditional variances and dynamic correlations among these markets. The evidence implies that these markets are closely linked and gradually integrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The improved Chinese information environment influenced China's capacity to accept Freedom of Information (FOI). The comparison of different information management approaches to crises taken by the Chinese government over time demonstrates that without the improvement of the information environment due to the formation of multiple paths for information flow, the Chinese government would have been unlikely to be receptive to FOI reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's sustainable development goals and carbon neutrality targets cannot be achieved without revolutionary transitions of the agricultural sector. The rapid development of digital technologies is believed to play a huge role in this revolution. The ongoing prevention and control of COVID-19 has greatly boosted the penetration of digital technology services in all areas of society, and sustainable transformation driven by digital technologies and services is rapidly becoming an area of innovation and research. Studies have shown that the rapid advancement of digitalization is also accompanied by a series of new governance challenges and problems: (1) unclear strategic orientation and inadequate policy and regulatory responses; (2) various stakeholders have not formed a sustainable community of interest; (3) information explosion is accompanied by information fragmentation and digital divide between countries and populations within countries. Meanwhile, current research has focused more on the role of digital services in urban governance and industrial development and lacks systematic research on its role in sustainable agricultural and rural development. To address the realities faced by different stakeholders in the process of digital transformation of agriculture, this paper aims to propose an inclusive analytical framework based on the meta-governance theory to identify and analyze the demand, supply, actor networks, and incentives in the digital technology-and-services-driven sustainable agricultural transformation, starting from the goals and connotations of sustainable agricultural and rural transformation and the interactions among different stakeholders in governing information flows. This analytical framework is further applied to analyze the cases of China and the EU. Although China and the EU represent different development phases and policy contexts, the framework is valid for capturing the characteristics of information flows and actor networks along the flows. It is concluded that a common information platform based on the stakeholder network would benefit all stakeholders, help reach common framing of issues, and maintain a dynamic exchange of information. Depending on the country context, different types of stakeholders may play different roles in creating, supervising, and maintaining such platforms. Digital infrastructures/products as hardware and farmers digital capacity as 'software' are the two wings for digital sustainable transformation. Innovative incentives from different countries may inspire each other. In any case, farmers' actual farming behavior changes should be an important criterion for evaluating the effects and effectiveness of digital transition governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The promotion of information flow reinforces the interactive cooperation and evolutionary process among cities. In the information age, public online search is a typical behavior of Internet society, which is the key to information flow generation and agglomeration. In this study, we attempt to explore the evolutionary characteristics of intercity networks driven by public online social behavior in the information age and construct an information flow network (IFN) from the perspective of public search attention. We also explore the evolution of the IFN in terms of the whole network, node hierarchy, and subgroup aggregation. Meanwhile, we also discuss the impact of the sustainable driving factors on the IFN. Finally, an empirical study was conducted in Guanzhong Plain Urban Agglomeration (GPUA). Our results show that: (1) the information flow in GPUA fluctuating upward in the early study period and gradually decreasing in the later study period. However, the agglomeration degree of information flow in the urban agglomeration continues to increase. (2) The hierarchical structure of urban nodes in GPUA presents a trend of "high in the middle and low on both sides", and the formation of subgroups is closely related to geographic location. (3) The driving factors all impacting the IFN include public ecology, resource investment, information infrastructure, and economic foundation. This study provides theoretical and practical support for exploring the intercity network and promotes the sustainable urban development.

Exploration of urban spatial connections and network structures of urban agglomeration in the Yangtze River Delta, as well as its influencing factors, is of great significance regarding optimization of the development pattern of the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration and promotion of regional high-quality development. Therefore, based on Baidu index data in 2015 and 2019, this paper first analyzes the spatiotemporal variation characteristics of information-flow connections in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration. Then it uses social network analysis to explore the information-flow network structure in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration, and finally explores the influencing factors of information-flow intensity in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) The total amount of information flow in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration has had no obvious change, and the coverage of information flow in the central urban circle has expanded. (2) The network hierarchy presents a relatively stable "pyramid" distribution pattern, which tends to develop into a "spindle" pattern. (3) The overall network density of the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration is high and is increasing. The backbone network is a "triangle" structure. The central cities in the region are stable, and the subgroups are adjacent to each other geographically. (4) Gross Domestic Product, resident population of the region and the number of Internet broadband subscribers all have important effects on the total information flow, among which the number of Internet broadband subscribers has the greatest effect on the total information flow. In addition, urban functions and their positioning, urban events, history and culture, and other factors that are difficult to quantify also have a certain impact on the information-flow network among cities.

In the context of "space of flow", urban interaction has become the key force impacting urban landscape evolution and urban sustainable development. Current research on urban interaction analysis is mainly conducted based on the interaction of geographical elements, the virtual flow of information in cyberspace has not been given sufficient attention, particularly the information flows with explicit geographical meaning. Considering the dramatic population migration and the explosive growth of cyberspace in China's main urban agglomerations, we constructed the information flow of migrant attention (IFMA) index to quantify the urban information interaction derived from public migrant concern in cyberspace. Under the framework coupling spatial pattern analysis and spatial network analysis, exploration spatial data analysis (ESDA) and complex network analysis (CNA) were adopted to identify the urban interaction features depicted by IFMA index in the three main urban agglomerations in China. The results demonstrated that, in the study area: (1) The IFMA index presented a reasonable performance in depicting geographical features of cities; (2) the inconformity between urban role in the network and development positioning confirmed by national planning existed; (3) in the context of New-type urbanization of China, urban interaction feature can be a beneficial reference for urban spatial reconstruction and urban life improvement. Using the cyber information flow with geographical meaning to analyze the urban interaction characteristics can extend the research angle of urban relationship exploration, and provide some suggestion for the adjustment of urban landscape planning.

Social pollinators such as honey bees face attacks from predators not only at the nest, but also during foraging. Pollinating honey bees can therefore release alarm pheromones that deter conspecifics from visiting dangerous inflorescences. However, the effect of alarm pheromone and its chemical components upon bee avoidance of dangerous food sources remains unclear. We tested the responses of giant honey bee foragers, Apis dorsata, presented with alarm pheromone at a floral array. Foragers investigated the inflorescence with natural alarm pheromone, but 3.3-fold more foragers preferred to land on the 'safe' inflorescence without alarm pheromone. Using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry analysis, we identified eight chemical components in the alarm pheromone, of which three components (1-octanol, decanal and gamma-octanoic lactone) have not previously been reported in this species. We bioassayed six major compounds and found that a synthetic mixture of these compounds elicited behaviors statistically indistinguishable from responses to natural alarm pheromone. By testing each compound separately, we show that gamma-octanoic lactone, isopentyl acetate and (E)-2-decen-1-yl acetate are active compounds that elicit significant alarm responses. Gamma-octanoic lactone elicited the strongest response to a single compound and has not been previously reported in honey bee alarm pheromone. Isopentyl acetate is widely found in the alarm pheromones of sympatric Asian honey bee species, and thus alarmed A. dorsata foragers may produce information useful for conspecifics and heterospecifics, thereby broadening the effects of alarm information on plant pollination., (© 2014. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd.)