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The authors intend to investigate the relations between corporate strategic positioning and environmental information disclosure (EID) behaviors in the context of the circular economy. The authors argue that the development of the circular economy is crucial to address environmental issues and achieve sustainable development, and companies play a vital role in this process as micro-entities. By examining corporate EID behaviors, the authors could understand their adoption of circular practices to a certain extent.

The authors conduct a content analysis of companies' annual fiscal reports, social responsibility reports and environmental reports and develop text-based proxies for both strategic positioning and EID quality to explore the relationship between them.

The authors find that corporate strategic positioning does affect corporate EID behaviors. Specifically, firms that implement a prospector strategy are more likely to engage in high-quality EID. Furthermore, the results suggest that green innovation is one of the mediators through which strategic positioning affects EID. Compared with defenders, prospectors are more likely to engage in green innovation, which, in turn, leads to higher-quality EID and demonstrates a more active approach to the circular economy.

This study contributes to the literature on strategic positioning and corporate EID by providing empirical evidence on the impact of corporate strategic positioning on EID behaviors. Moreover, the study employs a textual analysis approach to measure corporate strategy and EID, which is a relatively new research method in this field.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate organizational information technology (IT) deployment from a dual decision-making perspective. This study builds on rational choice theory to characterize how the costs and values of incumbent IT and those of the corresponding new cloud computing influence a company's dual decision of discontinuance and acceptance.

This study chooses cloud computing as the research context, since it is one of the most well-accepted ITs in current practice. By using survey methodology, the data were collected from organizations around the world. Our hypotheses were examined via multimethod analyses, including the partial least squares, the multinomial log it regression and the analysis of variance.

This research reveals that organizations often follow the dual decision-making process in IT deployment regarding a non-cloud, hybrid structure and full-cloud considers incumbent IT discontinuance and new cloud computing acceptance. These results indicate that organizations may embrace cloud computing because of its perceived high system compatibility and low support costs. Meanwhile, security threats remain the primary obstacles to conducting business in the cloud.

Previous studies mainly focus on a single aspect and do not reveal the intricacies of the interactions between the reduction of incumbent IT and the addition of new IT. To address this gap in the body of knowledge, our study proposes a dual decision model based on a dialectical understanding of new and incumbent IT mechanisms instead of a singular IT acceptance model.

With the analysis of the causes of corruption, this study aims to investigate specific anti-corruption measures that can be implemented to reform the political system and the social climate of China.

This study examines 97 severe corruption cases of high-ranking officials in China, which occurred between 2012 and 2015. As this insinuates that both institutional and social corruption are major problems in China, the analysis delves into multiple facts of corruption, including different types, four primary underlying causes, and suggestions regarding the implementation of three significant governmental shifts that focus on investigation, prevention tactics and legal regulations.

China’s corruption is not only individual-based but also it has developed into institutional corruption and social corruption. Besides human nature and instinct, the causes of corruption can be organised into four categories, namely, social customs, social transitions, institutional designs and institutional operations. For the removed high-ranking officials, the formation of interest chains was an important underlying cause behind their corruption.

This study makes a significant contribution to the literature because this study provides a well-rounded approach to a complex issue by highlighting the significance of democracy and the rule of law as ways to regulate human behaviour to combat future corruption.

Nowadays, the rapid growth of information technology strategies such as cloud computing is very noticeable in organizations. The advantages of the cloud environment are unavoidable because of an increase in innovation, flexibility and economy. Therefore, the critical topic is considering the factors affecting the adoption of cloud computing. This study aims to understand the factors of the adoption of cloud computing and its benefit in companies.

A research framework with four hypotheses has been developed based on the results of previous studies. Structural equation modeling has been used for data analysis.

The proposed model is verified by the results. In addition, the results have shown that cloud computing adoption is affected by four variables as follows, including human factor (with sub-indicator personal innovativeness and knowledge), organizational factor (with sub-indicator size, adequacy of resources and top management support), technical factor (with sub-indicator compatibility and security) and environmental factor (with sub-indicator regulatory environment, competitive pressure and trading partner).

There are crucial implications in the findings: they have an essential contribution to the research community, administrators and Information and Communications Technology providers with respect to framing improved tactics for the adoption of cloud computing. The proposed model can enhance the perception of service providers about why some services sectors accept cloud computing amenities, whereas apparently the same ones having the same market situations do not. In addition, the above providers should enhance their interaction with the services sectors contributed to the cloud computing experience to make a well-organized setting for the adoption of cloud computing, and eliminate any ambiguity about this sort of technology. Moreover, the sample has been limited to Iran respondents.

The research studies about the usage of cloud computing have shown its effects on organizations today. Also, the different impacts of cloud computing on other contexts and organizations are in the center of attention. By carefully considering and managing cloud computing adoption logics, organizations could get significant advantages.

Cloud computing’s technical and operational issues have been central in most of the previous studies. Some surveys have referred to the adoption of cloud computing by the organizations in terms of human characteristics or the contextual factor. Therefore, there should be a model and outline to assess the effect of aforesaid factors on cloud computing adoption.

Grey set is the important foundation of the grey mathematics and grey system theory, and the possibility function is the way of expressing grey set. This paper aims to establish the method of determining the possibility function of grey set and discusses its extended applications.

First, the grey kernel and the grey support set of grey set are defined, and the properties of grey kernel are analyzed. Second, according to the decomposition theorem of grey set, a method of determining the possibility function of grey set is put forward in this paper, which is called the method of increasing information and taking maximum and minimum (IITMM), and then it is further simplified as the method of increasing information and taking maximum (IITM), and an simple example is given to illustrate the calculation procedure. Finally, the grey information cluster method (GICM) based on IITM is proposed and applied to the ecological and geographical environment analysis of pine caterpillar.

The results show that the grey kernel of grey set still has grey uncertainty; the method of IITM has simple calculation and strict mathematical basis, and it can synthesize the information of the research object and accords with the principle of using minimum information; the GICM and the fuzzy cluster method have the same classification effect.

The researches show that method of IITM can be used not only to determine the possibility function of the grey set effectively, but also be used for the evaluation and cluster analysis of connotative objects. The classification result of the GICM presented in this paper is more precise than that of the fuzzy cluster method.

The paper succeeds in realizing both the IITM method for determining the possibility function of grey set and the GICM based on IITM for the connotative objects.

A little-known “lottery fever” has spread to many parts of rural China over the past 10 years. This is driven by participation in underground lotteries with local bookies. It is called liuhecai, which is the name of the Hong Kong lottery, and is based on guessing the bonus number of the Hong Kong Mark Six lottery. Such lotteries are illegal, but are an open secret. This chapter seeks to understand the meaning of this apparently irrational lottery fever: why people participate in it, why they believe the conspiracy theory that it is rigged (and yet still participate), and why similar lotteries have emerged in both capitalist Taiwan and post-socialist China at this particular time.