Communication and Conflict in Sino-German Global Virtual Teams

This study investigated the correlation between communication and conflict of Sino-German Global Virtual Teams (GVT). An exploratory quantitative online survey was conducted in German companies doing business in Greater China. A focus was given to the analysis of modern web 2.0 communication technologies and their potential influence on conflict. As expected, GVT experience more cross-cultural conflicts than collocated teams. However, there was no statistically significant difference in the amount of conflict between GVT 1.0 and GVT 2.0. Surprisingly, video calls are likely to contribute to the amount of task conflicts and cross-cultural conflicts. Furthermore, social media is likely to mitigate the amount of cross-cultural conflicts. Participants who extensively used social media and video call communication in their private lives, did so in their corporate lives as well. Finally, the team leaders who possessed a higher level of education reported a statistically higher amount of video call usage in their teams

Chinese Reality TV- A Case Study of GDTV’s The Great Challenge for Survival

The emergence of reality programming has a parallel development with Chinese television media at the beginning of this century. This study of Chinese “Reality TV” is based on a case study of a pioneer Chinese reality production, namely The Great Challenge for Survivor (GDTV, 2000-2006). The general concern of this thesis is an examination of the localizing of popular foreign outdoor survival formats (the Japanese top-rating Airway Boys and the international format Survivor) within a Chinese context. The study of this subject consists of field research into a major Party-state owned television broadcaster and a comparative analysis of the six broadcast seasons of the selected example. The research outcome presented here highlights some distinctive Chinese patterns in the outdoor survival reality strand prevailing early in this century and articulates the complex roles that a nationalized television station was required to play in the industrialized reform era. By recognizing the GDTV crew’s continuous efforts to improve production quality and to satisfy their assumed audiences’ needs, the thesis further addresses some key factors of the specific institutional system and broad media environment shaping local reality programme makers' decision making. Facing a “special television zone” in China, the local producer’s continuous modification of their reality programming was on the cutting edge of commercialization and globalization in the early 2000s. The production of the studied case was an exploratory enterprise which involved a set of negotiations, arguments and compromises while dealing with a range of issues which emerged in such areas as the cultural landscape, social environment, political discourse and economic power. To a large extent, the manifested transition taking place in this studied local production mirrors unprecedented social and economic changes occurring in contemporary China

Quality modeling in electronic healthcare: a study of mHealth Service

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have the potential to radically transform health services in developing countries. Among various ICT driven health platforms, mobile health is the most promising one because of its widespread penetration and cost effective services. This paper aims to examine Quality Modeling in Electronic Healthcare by using PLS based SEM

How motivations of SNSs use and offline social trust affect college students' self-disclosure on SNSs: An investigation in China

Social Networking Sites (SNSs) have been proliferating and growing in popularity worldwide throughout the past few years, which have received significant interest from researchers. Previous literatures on Internet suggest that offline social trust influences online perceptions and behaviors, and there is linkage between trust and self-disclosure in face-to-face context. Adopting the Uses and Gratifications perspective as the theoretical foundation, this exploratory study aimed to address the roles that motivations of SNSs use and offline social trust play in predicting levels of self-disclosure on SNSs. Taking 640 snowballing sampling on Renren.com, the study found that there was an instrumental orientation of SNSs use among China's college students. Social interaction, self-image building and information seeking were three major motivations when college students use SNSs. As expected, the results also indicated that motivations of SNS use and offline social trust play a more important role in predicting self-disclosure on SNSs than demographics. This exploratory study gives an empirical insight in the influence of motivations of SNSs use and offline social trust on self-disclosure online. --Social Networking Sites,Motivations,Self-disclosure,Offline Social Trust

Children’s buying behaviour in China: A study of their information sources

Purpose Reports an empirical study on children’s buying behaviour in China with a special focus on their information sources. Design /Methodology The key literature on consumer socialisation of children is reviewed. Primary data was collected from a sample of 155 children aged 10 to 13 using questionnaire survey. Various statistical methods such as Pearson correlation and tests were employed to analyse the data. Findings Chinese children regard TV commercials as an important information source for new product. However, they place greater level of trust in interpersonal information sources, especially in their parents who are perceived as the most credible information source with respect to their learning about new food products. Originality /Value The study has made a contribution to the extant literature on Chinese children as consumer. The findings would be valuable in assisting companies, specially those in the food industry, to have a better understanding of Chinese children’s buying behaviour

Data Innovation for International Development: An overview of natural language processing for qualitative data analysis

Availability, collection and access to quantitative data, as well as its limitations, often make qualitative data the resource upon which development programs heavily rely. Both traditional interview data and social media analysis can provide rich contextual information and are essential for research, appraisal, monitoring and evaluation. These data may be difficult to process and analyze both systematically and at scale. This, in turn, limits the ability of timely data driven decision-making which is essential in fast evolving complex social systems. In this paper, we discuss the potential of using natural language processing to systematize analysis of qualitative data, and to inform quick decision-making in the development context. We illustrate this with interview data generated in a format of micro-narratives for the UNDP Fragments of Impact project

Attitudes expressed in online comments about environmental factors in the tourism sector: an exploratory study

The object of this exploratory study is to identify the positive, neutral and negative environment factors that affect users who visit Spanish hotels in order to help the hotel managers decide how to improve the quality of the services provided. To carry out the research a Sentiment Analysis was initially performed, grouping the sample of tweets (n = 14459) according to the feelings shown and then a textual analysis was used to identify the key environment factors in these feelings using the qualitative analysis software Nvivo (QSR International, Melbourne, Australia). The results of the exploratory study present the key environment factors that affect the users experience when visiting hotels in Spain, such as actions that support local traditions and products, the maintenance of rural areas respecting the local environment and nature, or respecting air quality in the areas where hotels have facilities and offer services. The conclusions of the research can help hotels improve their services and the impact on the environment, as well as improving the visitors experience based on the positive, neutral and negative environment factors which the visitors themselves identified

Does the public discuss other topics on climate change than researchers? A comparison of explorative networks based on author keywords and hashtags

Twitter accounts have already been used in many scientometric studies, but the meaningfulness of the data for societal impact measurements in research evaluation has been questioned. Earlier research focused on social media counts and neglected the interactive nature of the data. We explore a new network approach based on Twitter data in which we compare author keywords to hashtags as indicators of topics. We analyze the topics of tweeted publications and compare them with the topics of all publications (tweeted and not tweeted). Our exploratory study is based on a comprehensive publication set of climate change research. We are interested in whether Twitter data are able to reveal topics of public discussions which can be separated from research-focused topics. We find that the most tweeted topics regarding climate change research focus on the consequences of climate change for humans. Twitter users are interested in climate change publications which forecast effects of a changing climate on the environment and to adaptation, mitigation and management issues rather than in the methodology of climate-change research and causes of climate change. Our results indicate that publications using scientific jargon are less likely to be tweeted than publications using more general keywords. Twitter networks seem to be able to visualize public discussions about specific topics.Comment: 31 pages, 1 table, and 7 figure

Brand Tracking on Social Media: The Role of Country of Origin Perceptions

Marketers are now almost a decade into using social media as another outlet in developing brand relationships with consumers. Yet an understanding of how consumers interact with brands online is still in its infancy. This paper compares the social media and brand-tracking habits of consumers in three parts of the world: Asia, the Middle East and the USA. In addition, the study attempts to explain what motivates consumers to follow brands on social media, focusing on the role of products’ country of origin in explaining the relationship. The results show that US consumers spent the most time on social media and tracked the most brands, while Thai respondents did the least of both. Four dimensions of social media brand tracking were identified and ratings compared across groups. Significant differences among groups were found for one of the four factors, ‘brand experience’, with US consumers experiencing significantly more positive ‘brand experiences’ than Thai consumers, and Egyptian consumers falling somewhere in between. The results also indicate that the country of product origin can have some effects on brand tracking