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Customer referral programs (CRPs) are popular; however, they often generate low referral rates. The authors propose that certain CRP referral tasks may hinder consumers’ referral likelihood. This study aims to explore the effects of referral tasks (communication content and approach) on customers’ referral likelihood on social platforms and the role of self-construal.

This study establishes a theoretical model based on online social platforms and conducts three scenario-based experiments. The authors obtain data from consumers on Sojump platform and test the hypotheses using analysis of variance (ANOVA) analysis and mediation analysis in SPSS. The valid sample sizes for these three experiments are 288, 203 and 214, respectively.

Three experimental studies indicate that communication content and approach have a significant effect on referral likelihood. Furthermore, the effect of communication content on referral likelihood depends on the communication approach. Self-construal plays a moderating role in the effect of communication content and approach on perceived social costs.

CRPs typically involve tasks and rewards; consumers are asked to complete a referral task and then receive a reward. Both tasks and rewards can affect an individual’s willingness to participate; however, existing studies on CRP focus primarily on the reward component. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to systematically investigate the role of referral tasks (communication content and approach) in CRPs. The authors extend the related research by examining the impact of referral tasks on consumers’ willingness to recommend. In addition, this study introduces self-construal into CRPs research.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a cradle-to-cradle (C2C) zero discharge production planning system with a fuzzy hybrid optimization model that uses fuzzy comprehensive evaluation to establish fuzzy indicators, and then defuzzify the fuzzy indicators to construct a fuzzy multiobjective programming (FMOP) model.

The FMOP model pursues overall satisfaction using a particle swarm optimization algorithm to produce the best output values for the maximum waste paper recovery rate, the condensate reuse quality and minimum total cost of the zero discharge production planning system.

Recovered waste heat is seldom recycled and consumed in Taiwan. There is a need to capture and utilize heat recovery and use it in the production process supply. In contrast, waste materials are used as resources to perform waste paper recovery and recycle the waste heat of evaporation collection in the production process.

This paper develops a system to establish the best output value for an overall high satisfaction level. According to the results, the waste paper recovery rate is 99.8 percent, condensate reuse quality water is 102.6 tons and the total cost of the zero discharge production planning system is NT$1,312,012.

To examine the nature of Chinese business negotiating style in Sino‐Western business negotiations in business‐to‐business markets involving large industrial projects from a social cultural point of view.

A conceptual approach developed from personal interviews.

This study reveals that the Chinese negotiator does not possess an absolute negotiating style but rather embraces a mixture of different roles together: “Maoist bureaucrat in learning”, “Confucian gentleman”, and “Sun Tzu‐like strategist”. The Chinese negotiating strategy is essentially a combination of cooperation and competition (termed as the “coop‐comp” negotiation strategy in this study). Trust is the ultimate indicator of Chinese negotiating propensities and role choices.

The focus of this study is on Chinese negotiating style shown in large B2B negotiations with Chinese SOEs.

Differing from most other studies on Chinese negotiating style which tend to depict the Chinese negotiator as either sincere or deceptive, this study points out that there exists an intrinsic paradox in Chinese negotiating style which reflects the Yin Yang thinking. The Chinese negotiator has a cultural capacity to negotiate both sincerely and deceptively and he/she changes coping strategies according to situation and context, all depending on the level of trust between negotiating partners.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which foreign live-in carers are able to construct agentive identities which counteract negative discourses regarding care work, sex and nationality.

Interviews with women working as carers in Bologna form the basis of this research which focuses on “small stories”. Using positioning analysis, both the immediate context where the narrative takes place and the wider societal discourses being referenced are examined. Subsequently, common recurrent discourses related to being a foreign carer in Italy are identified.

The interviewees make strategic use of prevailing negative discourses to construct counter narratives to avoid being positioned as low-skilled workers and to permit them to reject negative stereotypes of what it means to be a carer. In addition, more positive identities are constructed.

These findings suggest that a sociolinguistic approach can help towards a better understanding of the lived-experiences of foreign care workers, as it can reveal aspects of carers’ lives which do not easily fit into the categories which are often the focus of larger-scale, thematic studies.

This paper combines an analysis of content together with an analysis of the construction of narrative to present a more complete picture of the reality of working as a carer today.

Ports, as one of the important links between different modes of transport within the logistics chain, have special essence since their efficiency and competitiveness will certainly have an impact on the chain, and hence the national and regional economy. Vietnam, as a developing country gradually integrating into the regional and global economy, is rationalizing its economic sectors, including transportation. In this environment, ports play a vital role for the purpose of achieving comparative advantages in the international market. However, the Vietnamese port system is burdened with outdated work practices, low efficiency and poor competitiveness compared to other ports in the region. This paper identifies some of the problems in the Vietnamese port system and proposes strategies to address them.

Integrated project delivery (IPD) project that does not use multiparty agreement is identified as IPD-ish. The use of IPD-ish arrangement by incorporating integration practices in conventional contract can be viewed as the part of the adoption process of IPD. Moreover, inappropriate integration practices invite new forms of risks and the absence of multiparty agreement adds to the challenges of risk management in IPD-ish projects. This study discusses such challenges and proposes the use of joint risk management to address the potential pitfalls in IPD-ish arrangement.

A mixed research method was applied. First, the criticality of IPD-ish general and integration-specific risks was examined through a survey. Second, a real IPD-ish project was used to exemplify the use of joint risk management (JRM) to manage IPD-ish risks.

Two types of risks, namely integration risks (IRs) and general risks (GRs), are identified in IPD-ish projects. Two major findings for the IRs: (1) the most critical IRs are related to unbalanced incentivization and inefficient multidisciplinary teams; and (2) only team formation related pre-contract JRM strategies affect IRs. As for the GRs, the most critical ones are associated with design issues and can be effectively mitigated by post-contract JRM.

Using IPD-ish arrangement is an inevitable part of implementation of full IPD. This happens as many change-averse owners would like to test the integration principles using a conventional contract that they are familiar with. In fact, success in IPD-ish would pave the path for further adoption of IPD. This study offers insight into categorization of risks in IPD-ish projects. Appropriate use of post-contract and organization related pre-contract JRM would improve the chance of teasing out the values of IPD through IPD-ish arrangements. Care should be taken to introduce some contracting integration initiatives, such as risk/reward sharing incentive.

This paper depicts barbershop singing as a masculine social form, and compares and contrasts the original masculine form with the ways the form is feminized. Two organizations, Sweet Adelines International (SAI) and The Barbershop Harmony Society (BHS) perform and promote barbershop singing. We document the devices used to feminize the form (naming, song selection, choreography, fashion, and organizational style), and argue that an interaction between form and content takes place in the women’s organization that genders the form in spite of its original masculine meanings. Theoretically significant is the description of how feminizing a masculine form reinforces the conservative ethos of, and hence senses of membership in, the barbershop form. Demonstrating that forms can accommodate even culturally distinctive content has implications for understanding the interaction between form and content.

Supreme audit institutions (SAIs) have become increasingly active in recent years in carrying out “performance audits” of various public bodies. But how does SAIs report on their own performance? The purpose of this paper is to report on a study (commissioned by the UK National Audit Office (NAO)) of how SAIs report on their own performance and explores a possible conceptual framework – a synthesis of work on “performance regimes”, “public value” and “competing values” approaches – which might provide a basis for enhancing such reporting.

The paper is based first on a review of self‐reporting of performance by SAIs in Australia, Canada, the USA, New Zealand and with a specific focus in more detail on the UK's NAO. In Section I, it explores existing self‐reporting practices of a number of SAIs based on their published reports. Section II of this paper is more conceptual. Drawing on notions of “performance regimes”, “public value” and “competing values”, it seeks to re‐conceptualise how SAIs in general, and the NAO specifically, might usefully report on their performance for multiple external audiences.

The conclusions drawn from the first part of the paper include that multiple measures of SAI performance have evolved, including impacts on governments; financial savings; impact on parliament; media impact, etc. The second part concludes tentatively that a synthesis of “public value” and “competing values” might provide a conceptual framework for making more sense of such multiple reporting.

The immediate practical value of this paper should be for SAIs in providing a possible framework for analysing and developing their own performance reporting policies to address multiple dimensions of achievement and meet the needs of multiple stake holders. More widely, this framework can be applied to other public agencies.

There are few, if any, current studies of comparative SAI self‐reporting of performance, so this paper makes a substantial contribution in this area. The conceptual framework developed in the second half of the paper is also unique in synthesising two important streams of thinking about “public value” and “competing values” which has far wider applicability than the study of SAIs.

Supreme audit institutions (SAIs) examine and supervise the activity of public institutions. The study aims at contributing to the existing literature on public sector audit by providing a classification of 29 European SAIs – 28 national SAIs and the European Court of Auditors (ECA) – based on a broad range of attributes varying from the SAIs' environment to its structure, activity, resources or transparency.

The authors apply quantitative methodology for clustering by means of multidimensional scaling and regressive ordinary least square (OLS) and logistic models.

The authors' results show that SAIs from veteran EU member states (MSs) are more similar amongst them and the same applies to SAIs from Nordic countries, Baltic countries, Western Mediterranean countries and Eastern countries. The authors also perform additional analysis focussing on currently relevant issues such as gender equality, age, environment or the sustainable development goals (SDGs), concluding that the younger the institutions' staff, the more transparent the institutions are. The authors also find that more transparent SAIs report on environmental audits, more prone to cover the SDGs in their audits.

The research is limited in purpose and scope because data cover only Europe. Given the limited number of observations (29), it does not have prospective purposes but only explanatory ones. The authors' findings are interesting for researchers because they offer original insights on public audit in Europe and cover matters of current interest such as environment, transparency or gender equality.

The research is also of interest for public auditors because it offers them information that may help them improve their activity and find institutional synergies, as the dataset is available to public auditors.

From a social view point, the paper shows that public auditors perform work on topics of interest for the citizens.

The dataset compiled for the research offers extensive data and a wide variety of attributes defining European SAIs and may offer future opportunities for research from different perspectives.