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Regarding human resource and labour relations management, academia focuses mainly on cities; however, rural areas are an integral part of China's economic structure. This study focuses on the movie projection industry in China's rural areas and explores how human resource practices (HRPs) are transformed and the labour process is reconstructed in digital transformation.

We adopt a case study of a rural movie projection company. The company's HRPs reconstructed the labour process of movie projection, and they have been promoted as national standards. Data were collected from in-depth interviews, files and observations.

Rural movie projection companies combine high-performance and paternalistic HRPs in the media industry's digital transformation. HRPs and digital technology jointly reconstruct the labour process. First, the HRPs direct labour process practices towards standardisation. Second, the digital supervision platform guides the control style from simple to technical, placing projectionists under pressure while increasing management efficiency. Third, rural movies made using digital technology have disenchanted rural residents. Accordingly, the conventional relationships between the “country and its citizens,” “individuals themselves,” and “models and individuals” have been removed, and a new relationship between “individuals themselves” is formed thanks to the novel HRPs.

This research plays a crucial role in exposing researchers to the labour process of rural movie projection, which is significant in China but often ignored by Western academia and advances the Chinese contextualisation of research on labour relations.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the boundary-spanning behaviors of Party organizations, and the processes and constraints of these behaviors in controlling worker unrest in Chinese resource-based state-owned enterprises in the “new work-unit system” using boundary-spanning theory.

This case study was carried out in a resource-based state-owned enterprise in the “new work-unit system” in China. The research utilized interviews and archival documents, and then coded and analyzed the data using NVivo.

In China, Party organizations’ boundary-spanning behaviors (PBSBs) in labor relations management are identified, and classified into the behaviors of the ambassador, task coordinator, and scout. Worker unrest can be controlled by these behaviors through the mediation effect of the behaviors of agents in the “new work-unit system” but can also be provoked in the transformation of the “new work-unit system.”

The Communist Party plays a key role in labor relations management in China’s SOEs; however, this role has not been explored in any depth. This study builds a model to reveal the “black box” in which the PBSBs influence the agents’ behaviors and how the agents’ behaviors then influence the workers, and in this way control worker unrest.

This study explores labor relations management behaviors of administrators and Party organizations in resource-based state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China based on social exchange theory and embeddedness theory. It builds up a process model for managing collective labor conflicts in resource-based SOEs in the Chinese context.

A comparative case study is conducted using two resource-based SOEs with similar backgrounds but differing in effectiveness of the management of collective labor conflicts. Data are collected from interviews, archival sources and a one-month participatory investigation.

The administrators and Party organizations of resource-based SOEs manage collective labor conflicts by means of human resource practices (HRPs) and Party organizations' boundary-spanning behaviors (PBSBs), respectively; foremen and unions perform a mediation role, especially under circumstances where administrators employ high-performance HRPs and PBSBs are closely integrated with the production process. The marketization of the “new danwei system” exerts a “provocation effect” but does not necessarily lead to collective labor conflicts. The root cause of conflicts lies in the inherent defects of specific HRPs and PBSBs, as well as the absence of the Simmelian tie in the social exchange interaction of actors.

First, this study develops a new construct of PBSBs for enterprises' Party organizations and explores its underlying mechanisms, which enriches the range of actors studied in the context of Chinese labor relations; Second, the authors develop a new dimension called “exemplification” building on the existing three-dimensional structure of boundary-spanning behaviors, which expands boundary-spanning theory. Third, the findings that Simmelian tie structure could better maintain the stability of labor relationship in the mediation process of labor-capital conflict management enrich the social exchange theory from the perspective of structure. Finally, this study deepens the existing research on HRPs by proposing a new explanation for disputes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of lanthana (La₂O₃) on the mechanical and tribological properties of polyimide (PI).

The mechanical and tribological properties of PI nanocomposites filled with La₂O₃ were studied by molecular dynamic simulations to explore the deep mechanisms from an atomic or molecular view.

The results showed that the hardness of the PI matrix increased after La₂O₃ modification with a decrease of 72.4% nanoindentation depth. Besides, the friction coefficient of PI decreased by 72.2% after filling La₂O_3, and the shear deformation was largely reduced under the same conditions. The adsorption effect of La₂O₃ on the PI molecular, which reduced the atomic relative concentration, velocity, interaction with counterpart Fe layer and the temperature rise in the frictional interface, contributed to the improvement of the mechanical and tribological performance.

This study reveals the friction and wear mechanism of PI composites filled with rare earth oxide at the nanoscale.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of SiO₂ on the tribological properties of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) composites from an atomic level.

Effect of SiO₂ on the tribological properties of PTFE sliding against Cu was studied by molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to explore the inherent mechanisms from an atomic level.

SiO₂ had a higher interaction energy with PTFE than copper, which contributed to an increase of interfacial temperature and velocity with severe adhesive wear on the PTFE molecules.

This study reveals the mechanism of SiO₂ on the friction and wear behavior of PTFE by MD simulation.