Voluntary disclosure of intellectual capital in Chinese (mainland) companies

This research examines the extent, quality, and determinants of intellectual capital (IC) disclosure in Chinese companies in order to obtain a comprehensive understanding with regard to the current status of IC disclosure in China, and further to provide some recommendations for IC reporting guidelines. A mixed methods approach, combining both qualitative and quantitative elements, was used. Specifically, the research evolved in three stages. Firstly, an IC disclosure index was developed as an instrument for content analysis through a questionnaire survey and consultation with a panel of twenty Chinese IC experts. Secondly, two years annual reports of 100 top A-share Chinese firms were coded for data collection using a coding framework developed from the disclosure index. The collected data were then quantified and analyzed so as to determine the extent and quality of IC disclosure by Chinese firms. Finally, a series of hypothesis regarding the correlations between IC disclosure practices of Chinese firms and nine impact factors (or determinants) were deduced on the basis of prior literature and some relevant theories. Then the hypotheses were tested employing the empirical evidence obtained from the second stage through some statistical techniques, such as univariate analysis and multiple regression analysis. Inconsistent with prior research, the results in this study indicate that the current level of IC disclosure in China was quite high in both extent and quality, and there was no significant information gap between the expectation of Chinese stakeholders and the actual practices of Chinese firms. It is contended that there are three factors motivating Chinese firms to report their IC actively: to reduce information asymmetry between the management of a company and various stakeholder groups; to discharge accountability to various stakeholders; and to signal organizational legitimacy and excellence to the market. It was also found that all the impact factors other than ownership structure had a significant effect on the level of IC disclosure of Chinese firms in univariate analysis, while four out of nine factors comprising firm size, ownership concentration, board independence and stand-alone sustainability report had a significant impact on the level of IC disclosure in multiple regression analysis. It is believed that the findings in this research could have a number of implications for academics, investors, managers, regulators and policy makers

Phylodynamic Patterns in Pathogen Ecology and Evolution.

The rapid evolution of viral pathogens requires us to consider epidemiological, ecological and evolutionary processes as coupled together and occurring at the same timescale. Rotavirus and influenza account for high levels of morbidity and mortality worldwide and are two important examples of such dynamics. In this work, I investigate the different evolutionary and ecological processes that shape the antigenic structure and phylogenetic characteristics of these two viruses. In the first part of my work, I use a theoretical model of influenza A/H3N2 to identify the relative importance of antigenic novelty, competition between lineages, and changes in the susceptibility of the host population to circulating strains in determining the evolutionary and epidemiological trajectory of the virus. I develop this model further to correspond with patterns of immunity and infection observed in rotavirus, and investigate how reassortment, the swapping of gene segments between viruses, influences the formation and replacement of rotavirus genotypes through immune mediated processes. In the second part of my work, I use a tool (SeasMig), which I developed, to infer alternative stochastically generated migration and mutation events along phylogenetic trees in a Bayesian manner. Using SeasMig, I first show how the seasonality of A/H3N2 influenza incidence corresponds to rates of immigration and emigration of the virus. Subsequently, I tease out the different evolutionary and ecological processes, which drive changes in the US rotavirus population following onset of routine vaccination. My work has implications for identifying likely evolutionary mechanisms, which may lead to reduced vaccine efficacy, and for vaccine strain selection.PhDBioinformaticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113494/1/dzinder_1.pd

Mapping the Climate Communication Research Landscape

Climate communication today seems to be at a point of reinvention. The recent rapid growth of the field and its disciplinary diversity have produced a profusion of evidence-based techniques and theories for communicating climate science and climate change, but no definitive answer on how to move the needle on climate action. A core challenge for the field at present is how to make this abundance of research accessible and usable for practitioners, so that opportunities for impact are not missed. Answering calls in the literature for synoptic perspectives on areas of science communication, I use bibliometric network analysis, topic modeling, and knowledge mapping techniques to create and analyze maps of the climate communication research landscape as represented by 2,995 publications about climate communication from Web of Science. Knowledge maps are structural and visual portraits of scholarship which are useful for identifying areas of opportunity and coordinating effort in interdisciplinary and action-oriented knowledge domains. The knowledge maps themselves reveal dense webs of connection among five distinct knowledge communities, indicating an intensely collaborative knowledge domain, and suggest new avenues for application of climate communication knowledge, in particular to support climate services and co-production. After presenting the results of the knowledge mapping study, I discuss ethical and practical challenges encountered in developing these knowledge maps and the strategies I employed to overcome them, adding to the methodological literature on this subject. Taken together, the three chapters of this dissertation represent a conversation about the structure of climate communication research and the tools required for discovering, depicting, and understanding that structure. The contribution of this work overall is to offer a fixed vantage point from which to study past and current state-of-the art climate communication, and the knowledge structure that supports it. This analysis can act as a benchmark for where climate communication is now, and a tool for recognizing when and how the field has grown beyond its current structure

Transforming Governance and Organizational Form in Collaborative E-government

The increasing digitalization in the process and the end-result of public service, a phenomenon widely known as e-government, is changing the range and ways of collaboration among governments and their stakeholders. Especially with the pervasive use of social media for knowledge sharing, today’s local governments are teaming up with their non-government stakeholders in an unprecedented width and depth to exchange knowledge and resources to build digital public services together. While these collaborative initiatives benefit from the complementation of knowledge and resources that are associated with extensive participation, these initiatives also exist under a shadow of confusion and conflict when organizing the changing range and relationships of stakeholders, aligning technology uses with divergent objectives of knowledge sharing, as well as coordinating different distributions of decision-making power and accountability. To tackle these issues, in this dissertation I develop an understanding of the co-evolution of governance, organizational form of e-government collaboration through the mediation of social media. Here I define governance as the attempts to address the issue of coordination, and organizational form as the structural features of the e-government collaboration. And I define social media as the Internet-based collaborative technologies that are accessible to both government and non-government stakeholders for creating, circulating, sharing and exchanging knowledge. My primary research inquiry is thus how do the governance and organizational form of e-government collaboration occur through the mediation of social media? To pursue this line of inquiry, I further explore the relationship between social media and the governance and organizational form of e-government collaboration. Specifically, I ask: • How does the governance of e-government collaboration occur through the mediation of social media? • How does the organizational form of e-government collaboration occur through the mediation of social media? Conceptually I take an ensemble view to understand the relationship between social media and organizational changes (i.e., governance and organizational form) and argue that while social media has the potential to change social arrangements, these arrangements also influence the use of social media. In particular, I use the technology enactment framework as a conceptual map to identify the embeddedness of technology adoption in institutional, organizational and cognitive arrangements. Furthermore, I complement the framework with the theory of institutional logics, technology frames of references, and temporary organization, to operationalize the understanding of the institutional, organizational as well as cognitive arrangements. I choose e-government in China as the empirical setting to address the research questions for its unique environment, including its recent strong policy push for e-government initiatives and public-private collaboration, its complex public administration environment, as well as the pervasiveness of social media (i.e., WeChat) for work communication in both public and private spheres. Such an environment provides a good number of e-government collaboration cases that are characterized by the heterogeneity of stakeholders, mediation of social media, innovative administration arrangements, and that can be followed and studied from their early stages. The dataset for this dissertation is collected from four cases of e-government collaboration in China. To better understand the development of e-government collaboration through the mediation of social media over time, I conducted a longitudinal study on one of the cases, of which the communication between the stakeholders is primarily mediated through the Chinese social media WeChat. For data collection, I used qualitative methods including interviews, participant observations, as well as document analysis. For the first research question, the findings indicate the key dimensions in the governance of e-government collaboration center around the distribution of decision-making power and accountability between government and non-government stakeholders. And social media, as a knowledge-sharing platform, is crucial for achieving balances as such in an undefined collaboration, as it provides ambiguity between stakeholders’ interests and needs, while still allowing stakeholders to develop a sense of consensus and informedness. For the second research question, the findings indicate that e-government collaboration can be organized differently through the mediation of social media. Nevertheless, a long-term examination shows the organizational form of e-government collaboration has to accord with the institutional logics at play. The form changes as the dynamics of institutional logics change. During the transition of these organizational settlements, social media plays an important role as a sandbox for experimenting with configurations of organizational structures, as well as a repository for shared knowledge and experiences. This dissertation makes three central contributions: First, it contributes to the conceptualization of governance in the era of e-government by highlighting the role of social media and its enactment in the occurrence of governance, and proposing an empirically driven typology of adaptive governance. Second, it contributes to the understanding of the organizational form of e-government collaboration by identifying the social media mediated hybridization process, and the characteristics of a social media enabled organizational form. Third, the findings extend the understanding of social media adoption in the context of e-government collaboration by providing a longitudinal account of social media enactment, and insights in the relationship between social media and government transformation

Towards non-technological innovation: communicating environmental science to the tourism workforce

Karmen Lužar investigated cross-sectoral communication as an example of non-technological innovation. Her study aims to improve environmental science communication to the tourism workforce. The study highlights the importance of detailed knowledge of the audience and provides recommendations regarding the messages and the media to be used

Reforming the governance of Chinese non-profits: a comparative analysis based on the UK's regulatory regime

China has witnessed a proliferation in the number of non-profits over the past two decades. As the ‘third sector’ that sits between the government, on the one hand, and commercial/for-profits, on the other, non-profit organisations have helped generate revenue for the Chinese Government, increased the number of jobs in this sector and delivered a wide variety of essential services. Notwithstanding these benefits, however, non-profits in China are unlikely to fulfil the increased social, economic or cultural expectations placed upon them, unless their own governance and infrastructure mechanisms are efficient, functional and well-designed. This throws up important and difficult questions about the role (and design) of board governance for non-profits in modern China. To answer these questions, the thesis seeks to develop an account of what contribution a board can make to the effective governance of non-profits in China, and how certain features of a board might be designed to achieve that. However, whilst the UK benefits from an abundance of academic literature, and regulatory experience, addressing non-profit governance, the Chinese non-profit sector, by contrast, has given such governance much less attention. Hence, this work provides a comparative study on non-profit board governance, drawing on the UK’s richer literature, thought and history in order to analyse better the challenges which China presents. Within this comparison, a number of social and political characteristics will be emphasised which distinguish the Chinese non-profit sector from that of the UK. Of crucial importance here is the interplay between board governance and social determinants in the Chinese context, especially the relationship between the sector and the Chinese Government. In short, then, the overarching goal of my thesis is to develop a blueprint for an effective board for non-profits, which can be adapted to the distinctive characteristics of the Chinese non-profit sector, and against which current board regulatory requirements in China can be measured