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Using resource-based theory and social cognitive theory, this study aimed to investigate crucial resources that new US fashion ventures need to survive the initial stage of business development. It also intended to discover the role and characteristics of founders that contribute to the success of a fashion business, as well as challenges and struggles that fashion entrepreneurs face.

For the study, a qualitative research method with in-depth personal interviews was conducted. Participants were recruited through purposeful sampling methods. Using a grounded theory approach, we analyzed the approximately 308 pages of primary source data, transcribed from the records of the interviews.

Findings were categorized into three major themes. First, financial resources and literacy, marketing, merchandising, as well as legal resources were identified as critical resources at the firm level. Second, at the individual level, four important human agency factors, including intentionality, forethought, reactiveness and reflectiveness were revealed as essential for the success of fashion entrepreneurs. Lastly, relationships and networks were highlighted at both firm and individual levels.

This study contributes to the understanding of fashion entrepreneurship, an understudied area. The study identified critical resources for the success of fashion startups, especially during the initial business development process. The findings also emphasized the importance of human agency factors and networks at both firm and individual levels.

The purpose of this work is to design the wire beam electrode (WBE) of P110 steel and study its corrosion behavior and mechanism under high temperature and pressure.

Packaging materials of the new type P110 steel WBE and high pressure stable WBE structure were designed. A metallurgical microscope (XJP-3C) and scanning electron microscopy (EV0 MA15 Zeiss) with an energy dispersive spectrometer were used to analyze the microstructure and composition of the P110 steel. The electrochemical workstation (CS310, CorrTest Instrument Co., Ltd) with a WBE potential and current scanner was used to analyze the corrosion mechanism of P110 steel.

According to the analysis of Nyquist plots at different temperatures, the corrosion resistance of P110 steel decreases with the increase of temperature under atmospheric pressure. In addition, R_p of P110 steel under high pressure is maintained in the range of 200 ∼ 375 Ωcm², while that under atmospheric pressure is maintained in the range of 20 ∼ 160 Ωcm², indicating that the corrosion products on P110 steel under high pressure is denser, which improves the corrosion resistance of P110 steel to a certain extent.

The WBE applied in high temperature and pressure environment is in blank. This work designed and prepared a WBE of P110 steel for high temperature and pressure environment, and the corrosion mechanism of P110 steel was revealed by using the designed WBE.

The purpose of this paper is to test the mediating role of top management team (TMT) team trust in examining the relationship between team processes (internal and external) and human resource management (HRM) decision performance (quality and satisfaction) in the context of the People’s Republic of China.

The sample data of this study include 524 team members from 76 TMTs in east China’s Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui provinces. IBM SPSS AMOS 22.0 software was employed for the data analysis.

The study finds that TMT internal and external processes have significant positive effects on HRM decision quality and satisfaction. The study further finds that TMT team trust partially mediates the relationship between TMT processes (internal and external processes) and HRM decision quality and satisfaction.

This research provides useful insights into the role of TMT team trust in enhancing managerial decision performance.

This study is among the limited studies that explore the influence of team trust in the relationship between TMT processes (internal and external processes) and HRM decision quality and satisfaction among TMTs in China. This study has extended TMT knowledge in mainstream management with guidelines on how to enhance organizational decision performance.

This article will select 25 years of subdivided data to perform Kaplan–Meier survival analysis on the export trade relations of Chinese wooden flooring, use discrete-time cloglog models to analyze influencing factors, use logit and probit models to test the robustness, and try to systematically reveal the duration of China's wood flooring export trade and its influencing factors.

This study used Kaplan–Meier survival function estimation method. In the survival analysis, survival function and hazard rate function are often used to characterize the distribution of survival time.

The continuous average export time of China's wooden flooring is relatively long, about 14 years. China's wooden flooring has a negative time dependency. After the export trade exceeds the threshold value of 15 years, the failure rate of trade greatly decreases, which has a “threshold effect.” Gravity model variables have a significant impact on the duration of China's wooden floor export.

Studying the duration of forest products trade is of great significance for clearing deep-level trade relations and promoting sustainable development of forest products trade.

The significant cultural difference between China and Western countries, primarily the USA, suggests that it is necessary for researchers to take an emic approach to understand how the concept of privacy concerns is interpreted from the perspective of people from within the Chinese culture. However, all privacy concerns studies in the Chinese context have virtually adopted an etic approach. Therefore, this study aims to answer the following questions: What dimensions do privacy concerns encompass in the Chinese cultural context? What are the structural relationships among these dimensions? The authors answer these questions by conducting a mixed method research.

The authors first content analyzed Chinese news reports about information privacy and found that trading, management and awareness are relevant dimensions of privacy concerns. Further, the authors validated the three dimensions by surveying 185 Chinese consumers.

The data showed that Chinese consumers’ privacy concerns have a second-order factor structure, where the trading, management and awareness dimensions are first-order factors.

The results of this research contribute to the literature by developing the construct of privacy concerns that fits the context of Chinese culture and also point out possible managerial practices to mitigate Chinese consumers’ privacy concerns.

A holistic understanding of sources that evoke customer emotions is essential for creating a positive emotional customer experience (ECX). Despite a significant focus on the cognitive aspect of customer experience and traditional customer behaviours (e.g. loyalty and satisfaction), limited attention has been paid to ECX and co-creation behaviours. The purpose of this paper is to address this important knowledge gap by identifying different emotions and prominent sources of ECX (i.e. emotion triggers and constructors) during service interactions. By doing so, key customer co-creation behaviours are also identified, which help enhance positive customer experience.

A combined application of the appraisal theory and thematic analysis was used to explore ECX, its sources and co-creation behaviours as observed from 1,063 TripAdvisor customer reviews of luxury hotels in Ireland.

The results show that a single service interaction can evoke multiple emotions during the interaction process. The findings capture prominent emotions that customers experience and various important emotion triggers (physical environment, service management and offerings and human interaction) and constructors (customer expectation, accumulated service experience and culture fusion and authenticity). Three main customer co-creation behaviours (reinforcing intention, active and resourceful behaviours), which help facilitate the co-creation of positive customer emotions, are also identified.

The study proposes a new framework that provides unique insights into ECX to guide service improvement and innovation. A novel approach of applying the appraisal theory to a netnographic study is used to develop an ECX framework, which integrates various emotion triggers and constructors, and subsequent customer co-creation behaviours in the hotel industry.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel resource management strategy, which needs no special frameworks and directory servers.

The key idea is to piggyback a little extra packet header on the normal routing message by resource providers randomly. The clients can obtain the resource information gradually and need no dedicated resource queries.

The results of simulation confirm the good performance of our algorithms in different situations in terms of query latency and power consumption.

A novel resource management strategy, which needs no special frameworks and directory servers. The approach can be used in many current routing protocols. The quality of service issue is also considered for resource discovery algorithm and broadcasting method.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how credit ratings affect corporate financial behavior from the perspective of merger and acquisition (M&A) decisions. The goal is to test the financing and supervisory effects of credit ratings and study the economic consequences of credit ratings in the context of China.

Using a sample of Chinese A-share listed companies over the 2008–2017 period, this paper empirically examines the effect of credit ratings on firms’ M&A decisions. The authors used a probit model for regression when they tested the effect of credit rating on M&A likelihood and a tobit model when they tested the effect of credit rating on M&A intensity.

First, rated enterprises tend to make more acquisitions compared with non-rated enterprises, consistent with the hypothesis that credit ratings alleviate financing constraints. Second, high-rated enterprises are more cautious toward M&As due to concerns about preserving their ratings, which indicates that credit ratings also play a supervisory role in the M&A process. Additional tests show that enterprises reduce M&A activity after a rating downgrade to avoid further deterioration in their ratings; this further supports the supervisory role of credit ratings.

This paper adds incremental evidence to the literature on the impact of credit ratings on corporate financial behavior and extends the literature on the factors influencing M&As. The authors provided empirical evidence from emerging capital markets for the financing and supervisory effects of credit ratings and provided theoretical guidance for promoting the stable, long-term development of China’s credit rating industry.

This paper aims to present a novel dynamic reliability model that considers the interval mixed uncertainty for the air-breathing hypersonic flight vehicle (AHFV) to guarantee flight safety and structural reliability.

Initially, the force condition of the fuselage is analyzed based on the longitudinal elastic model of an AHFV. Subsequently, a new high-efficiency dynamic reliability model is presented to describe the failure probability evolution of the fuselage structure. For the random uncertainty problem with interval distribution parameters, the interval PHI2 method of time-dependent reliability is used to obtain the time-dependent reliability interval of the AHFV. Finally, the key variables that affect the failure probability accumulation are determined, which provide an important reference for ensuring structural reliability and improving the life span of AHFVs.

It is demonstrated that the proposed reliability model can obtain more accurate dynamic reliability results for the fuselage, and it is confirmed the key variables that affect the failure probability accumulation. The results also provide an important reference for the reliability analysis of hypersonic vehicles.

The novelty of this work comes from the first application of the PHI2 method (considering the interval mixed uncertainty) in the AHFV and the development of a new reliability model for the entire body of AHFVs. The proposed analysis scheme is implemented on the dynamic model of the AHFV, which provides a more accurate reference for improving the structural reliability and life span of AHFVs.

This paper aims to develop a finite element analysis strategy, which is suitable for the analysis of progressive failure that occurs in pressure-dependent materials in practical engineering problems.

The numerical difficulties stemming from the strain-softening behaviour of the frictional material, which is represented by a non-associated Drucker–Prager material model, is tackled using the Cosserat continuum theory, while the mixed finite element formulation based on Hu–Washizu variational principle is adopted to allow the utilization of low-order finite elements.

The effectiveness and robustness of the low-order finite element are verified, and the simulation for a real-world landslide which occurred at the upstream side of Carsington embankment in Derbyshire reconfirms the advantages of the developed elastoplastic Cosserat continuum scheme in capturing the entire progressive failure process when the strain-softening and the non-associated plastic law are involved.

The permit of using low-order finite elements is of great importance to enhance computational efficiency for analysing large-scale engineering problems. The case study reconfirms the advantages of the developed elastoplastic Cosserat continuum scheme in capturing the entire progressive failure process when the strain-softening and the non-associated plastic law are involved.