Analyzing stage and duration of Anglo-Chinese business-to-business relationships

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Industrial Marketing Management. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2010 Elsevier B.V.The manuscript reports on a study aimed at analyzing a series of relational variables derived from the Western industrial buyer–seller relationship and Chinese guanxi literature. The findings based on data collected from over 200 Taiwanese trading firms reveal that buyer's perceptions of organizational trust, communication, cooperation, social bonding and the saving of face are higher in Anglo-Chinese relationships that venture beyond the short-term. It is also found that cooperation, social bonding and performance are greater in those b2b relationships surveyed that are relatively more mature than in emerging states. The findings also reveal that relationship duration and stage have a significant moderating effect on various Inter-organizational and Interpersonal–Outcome relationships. Several managerial implications are extracted to help Western firms better manage their international relations, as well as help new exporting firms penetrate such well-established guanxi networks

Reclaiming Housing for Sustainable and Equitable Development

Across West Virginia, Appalachia, the South, and other regions which have borne the historic brunt of extraction, capital flight, and systemic lack of opportunity, cooperative and community-based solutions to economic challenges have historically and presently been found in and amongst marginalized communities. As a critical component of community wellbeing, development, and prosperity, we situate housing as a necessary component to the understanding of cooperative, grassroots, and solidarity forms of economic organization. In this we explore the ways community-based housing solutions contribute to senses of community and solidarity both within housing structures and the broader community. We place these findings in the broader context of solidarity economy, as mechanisms for understanding both how solidarity is born and reinforced through community-based housing solutions

TORAY Improved Nip Roller Design

The Toray Plastics plant in Kingstown produces plastic films used for food packaging. The production process involves using high speed rollers to roll film to prepare for shipment of the product. However, there is a maximum speed that the rollers cannot exceed; higher speeds result in vibration between the film roller and the roller that supplies force to the film roller, known as the nip roller. The nip roller is used to force air out from between each layer of film. When vibrations occur, air pockets form in the rolls that cause the plastic to roll unevenly, ruining the product. The solution proposed by Toray is to redesign the nip roller mounting arm to eliminate vibrations at higher speeds. The process of solving this problem began with background searching. Literature and patent researches were conducted to explore previous inventions and articles related to production rollers, and then ninety conceptual designs were created by the team. Of these ninety designs, three were chosen as the most effective. Through engineering analysis, the diagrams, and simulations, a final design was developed. The new design involves the use of torque to create added force at the point of contact between the nip roll and the customer roll. The redesigned arm utilizes a horizontal beam that is loaded with weight. Along with this weight, an air piston is mounted to the horizontal arm, which greatly increases torque at the pivot point. The added torque at the pivot point is translated vertically up to the point of contact, where nip force is maximized. To prove that this design works, a prototype was built, made almost entirely out of 8020 Aluminum, excluding connecting pieces and a few bolts. The redesigned arm is simulated by two pieces of 8020 aluminum that are connected at a 90-degree angle. Five- and ten-pound barbell weights are loaded at the end of the horizontal piece, and a 2” compressive air piston is mounted to the bottom of the same piece. The combination of these two forces mimics the effects of heavier weights and a larger piston that will be used in the full-scale model. The prototype was built at half scale of the full-sized mounting arm and it is secured in a very stable cradle made of 8020 Aluminum. Prototype testing produced data that, when scaled up, exceeds the target nip force that Toray plastics requested to eliminate arm vibrations at higher roller speeds

Postural costs of performing cognitive tasks in non-coincident reference frames

An extensive literature exists attesting to the limited-capacity performance of everyday tasks, such as looking and mental manipulation. Only relatively recently has empirical interest turned towards the capacity limitations of the body coordinations (such as posture control) that provide the physical substrate for cognitive operations (and so mandatorily coexist with cognition). What are the capacity implications for the body’s safety and mobility, for example, in accommodating the need to stabilize the eye-head apparatus for looking, or when mentally manipulating objects in 3-D space? Specifically, what are the postural costs in having to position and orientate the body in its own task space while supporting spatial operations in cognitive task space? What are the performance implications, in turn, for everyday cognitive tasks when posture control is challenged in this way? The purpose of this thesis was to establish a theoretical and methodological basis for examining any postural costs that may arise from the sharing or partitioning of spatial reference frames between these two components (a frame co-registration cost hypothesis). In 7 experiments, young adults performed either conjunction visual search or mental rotation tasks (cognitive component) while standing upright (postural component). Visual search probed cognitive operations in extrapersonal space and mental rotation probed operations in representational space. Immersive visualization was used to operationalise postural and cognitive task contexts, by arranging for the two tasks (under varying postural and cognitive task-load conditions) to be carried out with respect to two spatial reference frames that were either coincident or noncoincident with each other. Aside from the expected performance trade-offs due to task-load manipulations, non-coincidence of reference frames was found to significantly add to postural costs for cognitive operations in extrapersonal space (visual search) and for representational space (mental rotation). These results demonstrate that the maintenance of multiple task-spaces can be a source of interference in posture-cognition dual-tasking. Such interference may arise, it is suggested, from the dynamics of time-sharing between underlying spatial coordinations required for these tasks. Beyond its importance within embodied cognition research, this work may have theoretical and methodological relevance to the study of posture-cognition in the elderly, and to the study of balance and coordination problems in learning difficulties such as those encountered in dyslexia and the autistic spectrum.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceEconomic and Social Research Council (ESRC)Warwick Postgraduate Research FellowshipGBUnited Kingdo

Postural costs of performing cognitive tasks in non-coincident reference frames

An extensive literature exists attesting to the limited-capacity performance of everyday tasks, such as looking and mental manipulation. Only relatively recently has empirical interest turned towards the capacity limitations of the body coordinations (such as posture control) that provide the physical substrate for cognitive operations (and so mandatorily coexist with cognition). What are the capacity implications for the body’s safety and mobility, for example, in accommodating the need to stabilize the eye-head apparatus for looking, or when mentally manipulating objects in 3-D space? Specifically, what are the postural costs in having to position and orientate the body in its own task space while supporting spatial operations in cognitive task space? What are the performance implications, in turn, for everyday cognitive tasks when posture control is challenged in this way? The purpose of this thesis was to establish a theoretical and methodological basis for examining any postural costs that may arise from the sharing or partitioning of spatial reference frames between these two components (a frame co-registration cost hypothesis). In 7 experiments, young adults performed either conjunction visual search or mental rotation tasks (cognitive component) while standing upright (postural component). Visual search probed cognitive operations in extrapersonal space and mental rotation probed operations in representational space. Immersive visualization was used to operationalise postural and cognitive task contexts, by arranging for the two tasks (under varying postural and cognitive task-load conditions) to be carried out with respect to two spatial reference frames that were either coincident or noncoincident with each other. Aside from the expected performance trade-offs due to task-load manipulations, non-coincidence of reference frames was found to significantly add to postural costs for cognitive operations in extrapersonal space (visual search) and for representational space (mental rotation). These results demonstrate that the maintenance of multiple task-spaces can be a source of interference in posture-cognition dual-tasking. Such interference may arise, it is suggested, from the dynamics of time-sharing between underlying spatial coordinations required for these tasks. Beyond its importance within embodied cognition research, this work may have theoretical and methodological relevance to the study of posture-cognition in the elderly, and to the study of balance and coordination problems in learning difficulties such as those encountered in dyslexia and the autistic spectrum