Advertising greenness in China: a critical discourse analysis of the corporate online advertising discourse

A growing number of companies, both multinationals and local firms, have begun to adopt the idea of sustainability development, and develop and market their green products/services with green advertising in developing countries. However, in the context of China where the idea of commercial environmentalism or green consumption is emerging and transported from the West, it is not clear that how the green consumption is advocated and how consumption practices are connected to environmental protection, and how the meaning of green consumption is constructed by firms operating in China. This study explores the Internet as a rich text for environmental marketing by analyzing the ways firms showcase details of their green products/services, production methods, business philosophy and other facets of their environmental practices and values. The online promotional information can be seen as corporate green advertising. Focused on the advertisings from corporate websites, and through the analytical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (e.g., Faircloug, 1992; 1995(a) (b); Wodak and Chilton, 2005), this study presents how a number of environmental conscious firms in China are portraying and promoting their environmental responsible image and green products/services, and aims to examine what firms are really telling and how they are discursively constructing corporate “greenness”. Based on the analyses of green advertisements from websites of four case companies (two MNCs in China: General Electric in China, Unilever in China, and two Chinese local firms: BYD automobile, and Landsea Real Estate), the study suggests that corporate green advertising discourse plays an active role in defining “reality” of greenness and imbuing meanings of consumption into environmentalism, as well as in achieving the hegemonic construction of corporate greenness. In addition, the corporate greenness is anthropocentric and embraces consumerist and post-materialist values. Instead of endorsing the environmentalism which appeals for a change of the current over-consumption lifestyle in capitalist development, the corporate green advertising strategically integrates lineages from green discourse of ecological modernization and political discourse of neoliberalism. In addition to similarities, dissimilarities existing between discourses from MNCs’ and Chinese local firms are identified in two aspects: greenness integration and greenness level. The differences in advertising discourses derive from both organizational resources and firms’ embedded economic, historical, and social-cultural contexts. Such differences prove the mutual constitutive or dialectical relationship between language and society and develop the argument that although firms play active role in constructing discourse, and green advertising discourse can be seen as corporations’ discursive approach to achieve environmental governance, their discourse is nevertheless constrained by both organizational internal and external influences

The Interactive Effect of Authentic Leadership and Leader Competency on Followers’ Job Performance: The Mediating Role of Work Engagement

© 2016, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. The effect of authentic leadership and leader competency on employee job performance has received growing attention in the past decades; however, few studies have simultaneously integrated these two leadership perspectives. We have thus developed a mediated moderation model to test the interactive effect of authentic leadership and competency on followers’ job performance through work engagement. Based on a sample of 248 subordinate–supervisor pairs, hierarchical regression analyses reveal that (1) authentic leadership positively relates to followers’ task performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB); (2) leader competency moderates the relationship between authentic leadership and OCB; (3) and followers’ work engagement mediates the main effect of authentic leadership and the interactive effect of authentic leadership and competency on followers’ task performance and OCB. All the three results are consistent with our hypotheses

The Modified Schultz Index of Trees

Abstract For a graph G = (V, E), the modified Schultz index of G is defined as the degree of the vertex u of G, and d G (u, v) is the distance between u and v. Lower bounds on modified Schultz index in trees in terms of the order and diameter are determined. Mathematics Subject Classification: 05C05, 05C1

Matching-Based Virtual Network Function Embedding for SDN-Enabled Power Distribution IoT

The power distribution internet of things (PD-IoT) has the complex network architecture, various emerging services, and the enormous number of terminal devices, which poses rigid requirements on substrate network infrastructure. However, the traditional PD-IoT has the characteristics of single network function, management and maintenance difficulties, and poor service flexibility, which makes it hard to meet the differentiated quality of service (QoS) requirements of different services. In this paper, we propose the software-defined networking (SDN)-enabled PD-IoT framework to improve network compatibility and flexibility, and investigate the virtual network function (VNF) embedding problem of service orchestration in PD-IoT. To solve the preference conflicts among different VNFs towards the network function node (NFV) and provide differentiated service for services in various priorities, a matching-based priority-aware VNF embedding (MPVE) algorithm is proposed to reduce energy consumption while minimizing the total task processing delay. Simulation results demonstrate that MPVE significantly outperforms existing matching algorithm and random matching algorithm in terms of delay and energy consumption while ensuring the task processing requirements of high-priority services

AerialVLN: Vision-and-Language Navigation for UAVs

Recently emerged Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) tasks have drawn significant attention in both computer vision and natural language processing communities. Existing VLN tasks are built for agents that navigate on the ground, either indoors or outdoors. However, many tasks require intelligent agents to carry out in the sky, such as UAV-based goods delivery, traffic/security patrol, and scenery tour, to name a few. Navigating in the sky is more complicated than on the ground because agents need to consider the flying height and more complex spatial relationship reasoning. To fill this gap and facilitate research in this field, we propose a new task named AerialVLN, which is UAV-based and towards outdoor environments. We develop a 3D simulator rendered by near-realistic pictures of 25 city-level scenarios. Our simulator supports continuous navigation, environment extension and configuration. We also proposed an extended baseline model based on the widely-used cross-modal-alignment (CMA) navigation methods. We find that there is still a significant gap between the baseline model and human performance, which suggests AerialVLN is a new challenging task. Dataset and code is available at https://github.com/AirVLN/AirVLN.Comment: Accepted by ICCV 202

Uformer: A Unet based dilated complex & real dual-path conformer network for simultaneous speech enhancement and dereverberation

Complex spectrum and magnitude are considered as two major features of speech enhancement and dereverberation. Traditional approaches always treat these two features separately, ignoring their underlying relationship. In this paper, we propose Uformer, a Unet based dilated complex & real dual-path conformer network in both complex and magnitude domain for simultaneous speech enhancement and dereverberation. We exploit time attention (TA) and dilated convolution (DC) to leverage local and global contextual information and frequency attention (FA) to model dimensional information. These three sub-modules contained in the proposed dilated complex & real dual-path conformer module effectively improve the speech enhancement and dereverberation performance. Furthermore, hybrid encoder and decoder are adopted to simultaneously model the complex spectrum and magnitude and promote the information interaction between two domains. Encoder decoder attention is also applied to enhance the interaction between encoder and decoder. Our experimental results outperform all SOTA time and complex domain models objectively and subjectively. Specifically, Uformer reaches 3.6032 DNSMOS on the blind test set of Interspeech 2021 DNS Challenge, which outperforms all top-performed models. We also carry out ablation experiments to tease apart all proposed sub-modules that are most important.Comment: Accepted by ICASSP 202