Labor Relations Conflict in the Workplace: Scale Development, Consequences and Solutions

Because the goals of employers and employees are often incompatible, conflicts are inevitable and an essential part of organizational life. The three studies reported in this paper addressed the issues of identifying the dimensions of workplace conflicts within organizations, exploring the consequences of conflicts, and finding appropriate methods of conflict resolution. The first study identified and developed three dimensions of labor relations conflict, including interest-based, rights-based, and emotion-based conflicts. The second study explored two sets of individual outcomes of labor relations conflicts and found labor relations conflicts had a negative effect on employee job satisfaction and affective commitment and positive effects on employee turnover intention and counterproductive work behavior. The third study tested the effectiveness of partnership practices as an alternative method of resolving labor relations conflicts. Suggestions are offered for future research on the labor relations conflict dimensions as well as its outcomes and solutions introduced in these studies

The Regulation of Migration in a Transition Economy: China’s Hukou System

Unlike most countries, China regulates internal migration. Public benefits, access to good quality housing, schools, health care, and attractive employment opportunities are available only to those who have local registration (Hukou). Coincident with the deepening of economic reforms, Hukou has gradually been relaxed since the 1980s, helping to explain an extraordinary surge of migration within China. In this study of interprovincial Chinese migration, we address two questions. First, what is a sensible way of incorporating Hukou into theoretical and empirical models of internal migration? Second, to what extent has Hukou influenced the scale and structure of migration? We incorporate two alternative measures of Hukou into a modified gravity model – the unregistered migrant's: (i) perceived probability of securing Hukou; and (ii) perceived probability of securing employment opportunities available only to those with Hukou. In contrast to previous studies, our model includes a much wider variety of control especially important for the Chinese case. Analyzing the relationship between Hukou and migration using census data for 1985-90, 1995-2000 and 2000-05, we find that migration is very sensitive to Hukou, with the greatest sensitivity occurring during the middle period.internal migration, Hukou, migrant networks, reforms

Sino-North American International Joint Ventures and Performance A case of Different Expectations

This study examines North American firms that have international joint venture (IJV) relationships in China and Chinese firms who have IJV relationships in North America. Data was gathered from the North American partner (n=50) and from the Chinese partner (n=57) to test several hypotheses regarding the reliability and comparability of various general satisfaction measures and specific indicators of IJV performance. The findings of this comparative study provide confirmatory evidence for the importance of several indicators of UV performance for the partners of IJV s from a developed and developing country perspective and the criteria that SinoNorth American managers use to evaluate IJV performance. Another contribution of the findings of this study is that it provides insights from the assessment of multiple industry and product perspectives for the North American and Chinese partners as to the extent that the IN achieved its strategic objectives as a measure of IJV performance

ETAD: Training Action Detection End to End on a Laptop

Temporal action detection (TAD) with end-to-end training often suffers from the pain of huge demand for computing resources due to long video duration. In this work, we propose an efficient temporal action detector (ETAD) that can train directly from video frames with extremely low GPU memory consumption. Our main idea is to minimize and balance the heavy computation among features and gradients in each training iteration. We propose to sequentially forward the snippet frame through the video encoder, and backward only a small necessary portion of gradients to update the encoder. To further alleviate the computational redundancy in training, we propose to dynamically sample only a small subset of proposals during training. Moreover, various sampling strategies and ratios are studied for both the encoder and detector. ETAD achieves state-of-the-art performance on TAD benchmarks with remarkable efficiency. On ActivityNet-1.3, training ETAD in 18 hours can reach 38.25% average mAP with only 1.3 GB memory consumption per video under end-to-end training. Our code will be publicly released

Re^2TAL: Rewiring Pretrained Video Backbones for Reversible Temporal Action Localization

Temporal action localization (TAL) requires long-form reasoning to predict actions of various lengths and complex content. Given limited GPU memory, training TAL end-to-end on such long-form videos (i.e., from videos to predictions) is a significant challenge. Most methods can only train on pre-extracted features without optimizing them for the localization problem, consequently limiting localization performance. In this work, to extend the potential in TAL networks, we propose a novel end-to-end method Re2TAL, which rewires pretrained video backbones for reversible TAL. Re2TAL builds a backbone with reversible modules, where the input can be recovered from the output such that the bulky intermediate activations can be cleared from memory during training. Instead of designing one single type of reversible module, we propose a network rewiring mechanism, to transform any module with a residual connection to a reversible module without changing any parameters. This provides two benefits: (1) a large variety of reversible networks are easily obtained from existing and even future model designs, and (2) the reversible models require much less training effort as they reuse the pre-trained parameters of their original non-reversible versions. Re2TAL reaches 37.01% average mAP, a new state-of-the-art record on ActivityNet-v1.3, and mAP 64.9% at tIoU=0.5 on THUMOS-14 without using optimal flow

Are cities healthy? A city health diagnose framework from the perspective of living organism

Cities, as organisms, exhibit complicated phenomena of life characteristics. With global urbanisation, sustaining the health status of cities has become an imperative issue. Proper diagnose upon the healthy status of cities requires a set of scientific and rigorous city health diagnose toolkits. With regard to city health diagnosis, extant studies have proposed various indicators. Whilst the diagnosis indicators appear to be fragmented and lack an organism perspective in investigating urban health status. This study thus fulfills the gap of existing literature by treating cities as living organisms and establish a conceptual framework of city living organism, which is composed by five aspects of living characteristics, including metabolism, response, adaptivity, growth, and reproduction. Based on the city organism framework, a set of city somatic index system is proposed, and detailed guidance upon how to use this set of index system to conduct city health diagnose is provided. City health diagnosis in referring to the established conceptual framework and index system can be undertaken at three levels: macro, meso and micro. The validity of the established city health diagnosis framework is tested via a case study of 12 Chinese cities. The city organism framework and city health diagnose index system provide a scientific toolkit for city managers and researchers to systematically investigate city health status and address any underlying urban diseases.</p

Automatic Article Commenting: the Task and Dataset

Comments of online articles provide extended views and improve user engagement. Automatically making comments thus become a valuable functionality for online forums, intelligent chatbots, etc. This paper proposes the new task of automatic article commenting, and introduces a large-scale Chinese dataset with millions of real comments and a human-annotated subset characterizing the comments' varying quality. Incorporating the human bias of comment quality, we further develop automatic metrics that generalize a broad set of popular reference-based metrics and exhibit greatly improved correlations with human evaluations.Comment: ACL2018; with supplements; Dataset link available in the pape