Determinants of best HR practices in Chinese SMEs

AbstractPurpose&ndash; The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors which determine the adoption of best HR practices in Chinese small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).Design/methodology/approach &ndash; Regression analysis was utilized to analyse survey data obtained from 345 enterprises operating across China in a wide range of industrial sectors.Findings &ndash; Enterprises with greater resources in terms of their size, their relationships with external organizations, their cooperation with foreign partners and the human capital of their CEO were found to be more likely to adopt best HR practices. Contrary to the findings of the existing literature no relationship was found of a relationship between family ownership and the use of best HR practices.Research limitations/implications &ndash; The cross-sectional design is an obvious limitation of the study. Other limitations relate to the generalizability of the study findings outside the context in which the research was undertaken, and the use of convenience sampling.Practical implications &ndash; Enterprises should consider building strategic relationships with external organizations and developing cooperation with foreign partners as a way of leveraging human resource expertise at a limited cost.Originality/value &ndash; This is the first study to examine how differences in the resource endowments of Chinese SMEs influence their adoption of best HR practices.<br /

Organizational rewards and employee commitment: a Chinese study

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to assess how the cultural value orientations of individual employees moderate their attitudinal responses to different categories of organizational rewards. Specifically, it seeks to examine how one dimension of traditionality, respect for authority, moderates the relationship between affective organizational commitment and three variables: pay satisfaction, autonomy and satisfaction with supervision. Design/methodology/approach: Hierarchical regression analysis was utilized to analyze survey data obtained from a sample of 290 employees of a major Chinese airline company. Findings: Employees high in traditionality were found to exhibit higher levels of affective commitment when autonomy and satisfaction with supervision was low. When autonomy and satisfaction with supervision was high employees low in traditionality exhibited higher levels of emotional attachment to the organization. Research limitations/implications: The cross-sectional design is an obvious limitation of the study. Another limitation relates to the generalizability of the study findings outside the context in which the research was undertaken. Social implications: Organizations should consider taking the cultural orientations of their workforce into account when developing appropriate human resource policies aimed at heightening employee commitment. This should enhance employee well-being, which is especially important in a global economy characterized by uncertainty and rapid change. Originality/value: This is the first study to examine how employees with different cultural value orientations respond to different categories of organizational rewards, in a predominantly traditional society

A reduced-reference perceptual image and video quality metric based on edge preservation

In image and video compression and transmission, it is important to rely on an objective image/video quality metric which accurately represents the subjective quality of processed images and video sequences. In some scenarios, it is also important to evaluate the quality of the received video sequence with minimal reference to the transmitted one. For instance, for quality improvement of video transmission through closed-loop optimisation, the video quality measure can be evaluated at the receiver and provided as feedback information to the system controller. The original image/video sequence-prior to compression and transmission-is not usually available at the receiver side, and it is important to rely at the receiver side on an objective video quality metric that does not need reference or needs minimal reference to the original video sequence. The observation that the human eye is very sensitive to edge and contour information of an image underpins the proposal of our reduced reference (RR) quality metric, which compares edge information between the distorted and the original image. Results highlight that the metric correlates well with subjective observations, also in comparison with commonly used full-reference metrics and with a state-of-the-art RR metric. © 2012 Martini et al

Discriminative Region Proposal Adversarial Networks for High-Quality Image-to-Image Translation

Image-to-image translation has been made much progress with embracing Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). However, it's still very challenging for translation tasks that require high quality, especially at high-resolution and photorealism. In this paper, we present Discriminative Region Proposal Adversarial Networks (DRPAN) for high-quality image-to-image translation. We decompose the procedure of image-to-image translation task into three iterated steps, first is to generate an image with global structure but some local artifacts (via GAN), second is using our DRPnet to propose the most fake region from the generated image, and third is to implement "image inpainting" on the most fake region for more realistic result through a reviser, so that the system (DRPAN) can be gradually optimized to synthesize images with more attention on the most artifact local part. Experiments on a variety of image-to-image translation tasks and datasets validate that our method outperforms state-of-the-arts for producing high-quality translation results in terms of both human perceptual studies and automatic quantitative measures.Comment: ECCV 201

Political Economy of Agency Employment: Flexibility or Exploitation?

The proliferation of agency employment in Pakistan is a serious labour problem and a public policy concern because of the potentially negative implications for agency workers' basic statutory rights. Agency workers are normally given a vastly different, often negligible, package of benefits from their permanent counterparts. They are especially vulnerable to instant dismissal and are generally excluded from collective bargaining arrangements. Unions regard the use of agency employment as exploitative, and a threat to their jurisdiction and membership. This article reports on an in-depth study of “payrolling” agencies. Pay-rolling agencies are a particular form of employment intermediaries through which employers attempt to bypass statutory obligations concerning workers' benefit entitlements and trade union rights, simply by paying workers through an agency. A total of 97 interviews, undertaken in six case studies across three industrial sectors with employees, employers, agency and union officials, and industry specialists revealed sufficient evidence on the use of pay-rolling agencies. The results confirmed the anecdotal evidence that some employment agencies are not truly genuine. The evidence suggested that there is a growing trend for agencies to be simply a sham arrangement, refuting the notion that temporary agency work has only been a natural and inevitable response to changes in the economy

Pakistan human resources for health assessment, 2009

Pakistan faces a human resources for health (HRH) crisis. A cross-sectional survey was conducted to overview frontline health workers. A total of 750 health facilities were surveyed across Pakistan. The median estimate of public sector health care workers in the district health system in Pakistan is 417 288, including 46 153 estimate of public sector health care workers in the district health system in Pakistan is 417 288, including 46 153 doctors and 41 032 nurses. Another estimated 20 000 doctors work in public sector tertiary care hospitals across the country. A total of 3549 health care workers were interviewed regarding job satisfaction and work environment. The private sector had better work environment scores compared with the public sector. Policy dimensions showed an absence of robust policies in practice. The public sector is inadequately staffed and job satisfaction and work environment need improvement. HRH crisis countries should share experiences, and developmental partners should support them in overcoming the HRH crisis

Behavior of hybrid steel fiber reinforced high strength concrete

High strength concrete has higher strength but lower ductility. Inclusion of single type of fibers into concrete has been proven to improve the behavior of concrete to a limited extent. However, recently it was found that the behavior of concrete can be improved more with the addition of hybrid fiber i.e., a combination of different types of fiber. This paper presents the results of an experimental investigation on the behavior of Hybrid Steel Fibre Reinforced High Strength Concrete (HSFR-HSC). A total of eight cylinder specimens with 150 mm in diameter and 300 mm in height were cast and tested under uniaxial compression. Three different combinations of HSFR-HSC specimens and reference specimens without steel fibers were prepared. The first combination of HSFR-HSC included 1.5% Micro Steel (MS) fibers and 1% Deformed Steel (DS) fibers. The second combination included 1.5% MS fibers and 1.5% Hooked-end Steel (HS) fibers. The third combination included 1% DS fibers and 1.5% HS fibers. The experimental results showed that the addition of hybrid steel fibers improved the strength and ductility of high strength concrete compared to the reference specimens. The results also showed that the specimens reinforced with different hybrid steel fibers failed in a ductile manner, while the reference specimens failed in a brittle manner

Central Nervous System Depressant, Analgesic and Antidiarrheal Effects of the Seed Extracts of Dimocarpus longan Lour in Rats

Purpose: To assess the central nervous system (CNS) depressant, analgesic and antidiarrheal activities of the dried seed crude extracts of Dimocarpus longan Lour in rodents.Methods: Selected pharmacological effects of the ethanol (ENLS), petroleum ether (PELS), chloroform (CHLS) and ethyl acetate (EALS) extracts of D. longan fruit seeds were investigated. CNS depressant activity was evaluated by open field and hole cross tests; analgesic activity by acetic acid-induced writhing test and formalin-induced licking test; and anti-diarrheal activity was assessed in castor oil and magnesium-induced diarrhea rat model. The extracts were given orally in a rat model at doses of 200 and 300 mg/kg body weight. Normal saline served as control in all experiment. In CNS depressant test, diazepam (1 mg/kg) was used as reference drug while indomethacin (10 mg/kg) and loperamide(2 mg/kg) were used as standard drugs in analgesic and antidiarrheal tests, respectively.Results: In hole cross method, EALS showed the most effective depressant effect, viz, 1.17±0.17 for 200 mg/kg dose and 0.83±0.31 number of movements for 300 mg/kg dose after 120 min (p &lt; 0.01), whereas in the open field test, all the extracts exhibited significant (p &lt; 0.01) depressant effect in relation to positive control, diazepam. In acetic acid-induced pain test, PELS gave the lowest number of writhing (2.83±0.307) and the highest inhibition (88.45 %, 300 mg/kg dose) which was statistically significant. All the extracts also significantly (p &lt; 0.01) suppressed licking activity in both phases of the formalin-induced licking test, in contrast to indomethacin. In the antidiarrheal tests, diarrheal suppression was highest at 300 mg/kg dose for all the extracts, compared with loperamide in both castor oil and magnesium sulphate induced diarrhea model.Conclusion: The extracts of Dimocarpus longan tested demonstrated significant CNS depressant, analgesic and antidiarrheal activities in a rodent model.Keywords: Dimocarpus longan Lour, CNS depressant, Analgesic, Anti-diarrheal