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Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is critical for organizations who want to pursue sustainable development and competitive advantage by influencing employee attitudes. Drawing on the deontic justice theory, we argue that internal and external CSR initiatives promote self‐focused and other‐focused justice, respectively, which contribute to employee‐perceived organizational justice and shape positive employee behaviors. This study applied a fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis method to determine the interactive effects of employee perceptions of CSR practices and organizational justice on employee outcomes. An examination of data from 1,231 employees in Taiwan revealed that high CSR perceptions lead to high perceived justice among employees who attach high importance to justice. In addition, while high perceived justice by itself is insufficient to determine positive employee outcomes, the combination of high perception of internal CSR, external CSR, and organizational justice is sufficient to predict positive employee outcomes. The findings provide implications for both research and practice.

The conventional design of notebook PCs configured with an optical disk drive suffers from structural durability problems that are indicative of potentially high defect rates. Companies have been attempting to reduce the size of assembly parts to pursue compactness, but the elimination of these materials might negatively affect structural stability, which is fundamentally important to all high-technology products. The Six Sigma methodology applied in this paper aims to improve quality performance and eliminate redesign waste and unnecessary handoffs according to customer requirements. This paper presents a case study using the define, measure, analyze, improve, and control (DMAIC) procedure. Several optimization techniques, such as response surface method (RSM) and computational intelligence, are adopted to optimize the significant factors that affect the module design and structural strength index during compression. Implementation results demonstrate that computational intelligence outperforms RSM. It shows computational intelligence reveals a good ability to solve the parameter optimization problems.

Glutamate-gated chloride channels (GluCls) mediate inhibitory synaptic transmission in invertebrate nervous systems, and only one GluCl gene has been found in insects. Therefore, insect GluCls are one of the major targets of insecticides including avermectins. In the present study, a 1347 bp full-length cDNA encoding a 449-amino acid protein (named MsGluCl, GenBank ID: MK336885) was cloned from the oriental armyworm, Mythimna separata, and characterized two alternative splicing variants of MsGluCl. The protein shares 76.9–98.6% identity with other insect GluCl isoforms. Spatial and temporal expression analysis revealed that MsGluCl was highly expressed in the 3rd instar and adult head. Dietary ingestion of dsMsGluCl significantly reduced the mRNA level of MsGluCl and decreased abamectin mortality. Thus, our results reveal that MsGluCl could be the molecular target of abamectin and provide the basis for further understanding the resistance mechanism to abamectin in arthropods.

Background: Transgelin, an actin-binding protein, is associated with the cytoskeleton remodeling. Our previous studies found that transgelin was up-regulated in node-positive colorectal cancer versus in node-negative disease. Over-expression of TAGLN affected the expression of 256 downstream transcripts and increased the metastatic potential of colon cancer cells in vitro and in vivo. This study aims to explore the mechanisms that transgelin participates in the metastasis of colon cancer cells.Methods: Immunofluorescence and immunoblotting analysis were used to determine the cellular localization of the endogenous and exogenous transgelin in colon cancer cells. Co-immunoprecipitation and subsequent high performance liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry were performed to identify the proteins potentially interacting with transgelin. Bioinformatics methods were used to analyze the 256 downstream transcripts regulated by transgelin to discriminate the specific key genes and signaling pathways. By analyzing the promoter region of these key genes, GCBI tools were used to predict the potential transcription factor(s) for these genes. The predicted transcription factors were matching to the proteins that have been identified to potentially interact with transgelin. The interaction between transgelin and these transcription factors was verified by co-immunoprecipitation and immunoblotting.Results: Transgelin was found to localize both in the cytoplasm and the nucleus of colon cancer cells. 297 proteins have been identified to interact with transgelin by co-immunoprecipitation and subsequent high performance liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry. Over-expression of TAGLN could lead to differential expression of 184 downstream genes. By constructing the network of gene-encoded proteins, 7 genes (CALM1, MYO1F, NCKIPSD, PLK4, RAC1, WAS and WIPF1) have been discriminated as key genes using network topology analysis. They are mostly involved in the Rho signaling pathway. Poly ADP-ribose polymerase-1 (PARP1) was predicted as the unique transcription factor for the key genes and concurrently matching to the DNA-binding proteins potentially interacting with transgelin. Immunoprecipitation validated that PARP1 interacted with transgelin in human RKO colon cancer cells.Conclusions: The results of this study suggest that transgelin binds to PARP1 and regulates the expression of the downstream key genes mainly involving Rho signaling pathway, thus participates in the metastasis of colon cancer.

Internal stakeholders' perception of corporate social responsibility (CSR) plays a crucial role for organizations in pursuing innovative, sustainability‐based business models. The majority of research on CSR has examined its effects on organizations' financial performance or external stakeholders' behavior toward CSR. However, little attention has been devoted to employees' behavior toward CSR. The current study investigated how organizations' CSR initiatives and the fulfillment of employee job needs (existence, relatedness and growth, or ERG) affect employees' job satisfaction and retention intention. Methodologically, the study applied the fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis method to capture the integrative effects of explanatory factors on the outcomes by examining the case of a leading chain department store in Asia. The results revealed that an organization's efforts on CSR could enhance the fulfillment of employees' ERG needs. Moreover, the perceived CSR initiatives could generate positive effects on employees' satisfaction and retention intention by fulfilling employees' ERG needs.

Importance-performance analysis (IPA) is a popular approach used by firms to focus resources on crucial attributes, reduce expenditure on non-critical ones and develop improvement and innovation st...

Complaining is one option available to customers to express their dissatisfaction with inadequate services. Their complaints contain valuable information for service providers to improve customer r...

Customer stickiness and satisfaction are both essential for a restaurant to occupy market share and earn profits in the face of fierce competition. This study applied fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to examine how environmental characteristics regarding restaurant location and individual characteristics of customers influenced customers' emotional responses to service attitudes, and how these emotions, in turn, influenced customer satisfaction and stickiness. A sample of 182 customers from a fusion cafe chain restaurant was collected and investigated. The results show that store characteristics and customer individual characteristics had a pronounced effect on customer emotional responses to the service attitudes of the restaurant, and that these emotional experiences served as critical antecedents to customer satisfaction and stickiness. The managerial implications of the findings are discussed for the restaurant chain to understand its weaknesses and to develop proper operational strategies and marketing polices for improving customer satisfaction and stickiness.

Location selection plays a crucial role in the retail and service industries. A comprehensive location selection model and appropriate analytical technique can improve the quality of location decisions, attracting more customers and substantially impacting market share and profitability. This study developed a data mining framework based on rough set theory (RST) to support location selection decisions. The proposed framework consists of four stages: (1) problem definition and data collection; (2) RST analysis; (3) rule validation; and (4) knowledge extraction and usage. An empirical study focused on a restaurant chain to demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach. Twenty location variables relevant to five location aspects were examined, and the results indicated that latent knowledge can be identified to support location selection decisions.

The ryanodine receptors of insects are the main target sites of diamide insecticides, which show highly selective insecticidal activity relative to toxicity in mammals and provide a novel option for managing lepidopteran pests. The oriental armyworm, Mythimna separata (Walker), is a destructive pest of agricultural crops, and great efforts have been undertaken to control this pest including repeated insecticide applications. In this study, full-length cDNA of a ryanodine receptor gene from M. separata (MsRyR) was cloned and characterized. The cDNA of MsRyR had a 15,372 bp open reading frame and encoded 5124 amino acids (GenBank ID: MG712298). MsRyR shares 78-97% identity with RyR isoforms of other insects, and50% identities with Homo sapiens RyRs 1-3. Temporal and spatial expression analysis detected MsRyR at all developmental stages and in all tissues. The highest relative levels of MsRyR were detected in the second instar and head. Exposure to chlorantraniliprole after 24 h significantly increased the expression levels of whole body MsRyR mRNA. In addition, dietary ingestion of dsMsRyR significantly reduced the mRNA level of MsRyR and greatly decreased chlorantraniliprole-induced mortality. Our results revealed that the MsRyR could be the molecular target of chlorantraniliprole, and provided the basis for further understanding the resistance mechanism of chlorantraniliprole.

Identifying primary service attributes that generate customer satisfaction (CS) is critical to organizational success. The Kano model demonstrates an asymmetric relationship between attribute performance and CS. However, extant regression-based approaches for classifying Kano's quality attributes have theoretical limitations, such as multicollinearity problems, resulting in spurious inferences. The association rule (AR) method is widely used in data mining to explore the associations or correlations among variables because it does not require the typical assumptions associated with regression analyses. The framework developed in this study incorporates the AR method to classify Kano's quality attributes. The effectiveness of the proposed method was demonstrated using a case study of a restaurant chain. The proposed method is more practical for classifying Kano's quality attributes because it shortens the time required for data collection. Moreover, the proposed method reduces computational complexity. Validity test results indicate that the proposed method markedly outperforms some regression-based approaches.

Application of insufficient or excessive amounts of the solder paste during the solder paste printing process can result in circuit issues, such as an incomplete circuit when the paste applied is insufficient and a short circuit when the paste applied is excessive. The former is resulting from a solder open; the latter is resulting from the forming of a solder bridge. This study attempts to optimize solder volume in a printed circuit board assembly. Computational intelligence techniques, including neural network, genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization, and simulated annealing, were used to address this problem. A real case study was presented to confirm the effectiveness of the computational intelligence techniques.

For the aim that describing the growth process of plant sticks with a effective model, presented a new method based on plant physiological characteristics, it also considered plant weight and light comprehensively. The model can reflect parallel growing of plants continually and dynamically, and the relationship between plant morphology and growing physiology is also be reflected at the same time. The simulation results show that the model is directly and provides a practical method for the research of virtual plant, especially for the plant sticks.

Location selection is a significant part of strategic management activities. The plurality and interactions of the evaluation criteria involved in the problem complicates the decision-making process. This study successfully proposes a set of systematic procedure for location selection using fuzzy-connective-based aggregation networks. The fuzzy-connective-based aggregation network can aggregate the relative status or achievement among locations in various location-related variables through a hierarchical decision-making structure. Finally, an overall evaluation of location is produced from various aspects. The trained model approximates the relationship between turnover and individual location-related factors, which can be used to predict the potential performance of candidate sites and to answer "what if" questions. The transparency and interpretation ability also makes the proposed method desirable. The weights and parameters in the evaluation model help identify the major factors influencing the turnover and the compensatory relationship among location-related factors. The effectiveness and applicability are confirmed through a case study of the food and beverage chain industry in Taiwan.

To establish digital growth model of Kentucky bluegrass repent stem, and study growth process of Kentucky bluegrass repent stem in coordinate system. After observing and studying growth data we found that there is a quick-slow-quick growth rhythm in the growing process, and the growth model of length is established according to the growth rhythm. Then using RMSE statistical methods to verify the model, the results indicates that the growth model is in line with grasses repent stem natural growth rhythm and has a certain degree of reliability and accuracy, it can describe the growth of repent stem exactly.

This study investigates the synergistic effect of combining multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs) and Fe2O3nanoparticles on thermal conductivity of nanofluid. Results show that low percentage hybrid fillers loading improve thermal conductivity of water based nanofluid, due to the good dispersion and interfacial adhesion, which is confirmed by scanning electron microscope. Furthermore, the hybrid fillers provide synergistic effect on heat conductive networks. The thermal conductivity enhancement of water based nanofluid containing 0.05 wt % MWNTs and 0.02 wt % Fe2O3nanoparticles is 27.75%, which is higher than that of nanofluid containing 0.2 wt % single MWNTs or Fe2O3nanoparticles.

Importance–performance analysis (IPA) is a popular customer-driven tool that enables companies to understand market competition and identify improvement priorities for various attributes of products and services. Despite the widespread use of IPA, previous studies have identified specific deficiencies. For example, the managerial improvement directions derived from IPA are potentially misleading because they ignore the asymmetric and nonlinear relationships between attribute performance (AP) and customer satisfaction (CS). Furthermore, the relationship between AP and importance is erroneously assumed to be independent. By contrast, the Kano model offers useful insight into quality attributes based on the asymmetric and nonlinear relations between AP and CS. In this study, a customer-driven framework is proposed, integrating the advantages of traditional IPA and the Kano model to elucidate the market competition position of each service and product attribute, providing strategic improvement guidelines for managers to design service activities. By conducting a case study of a restaurant chain, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Searching for an optimal feature subset from a high-dimensional feature space is an NP-complete problem; hence, traditional optimization algorithms are inefficient when solving large-scale feature selection problems. Therefore, meta-heuristic algorithms are extensively adopted to solve such problems efficiently. This study proposes a regression-based particle swarm optimization for feature selection problem. The proposed algorithm can increase population diversity and avoid local optimal trapping by improving the jump ability of flying particles. The data sets collected from UCI machine learning databases are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Classification accuracy is used as a criterion to evaluate classifier performance. Results show that our proposed approach outperforms both genetic algorithms and sequential search algorithms.

The objective of this cross-sectional observational study was to determine whether asymmetric hip mobility was associated with neck pain in young adults.Three hundred twenty-seven freshmen students were recruited from an urban university and underwent the Patrick's flexion, abduction, external rotation, extension (FABERE) test for comparison of the functional mobility of bilateral hip joints during the health examination. A logistic regression model was constructed to determine whether the asymmetry measured by the Patrick's FABERE test was associated with neck pain after adjusting for factors of sex and exercise habits.The frequency of asymmetric results of the Patrick's FABERE test among the students who reported neck pain was significantly higher than that of those without neck pain (54.2% vs 26.5%; P.001). After adjusting for the above confounders, the odds ratio of asymmetric results of a Patrick's FABERE test was 2.99 (95% confidence interval, 1.57-5.72; P.001).Imbalanced mobility of the hip joints might be associated with an increased incidence of neck pain.

The effects of a national quality award (NQA) on the market value of the award-winning firms have been reviewed in many countries, but relevant studies are rare to find in Taiwan. This study empirically examined the issue related to the market valuation of firms that undergo effective quality improvement programmes (which sometimes are referred to as total quality management) using Taiwan National Quality Award as the indicator that an effective quality improvement programme has been implemented. In this study, we intended to compare the NQA Index (which represents the performance of National Quality Award winners' stock price) with the Sector Index (which represents public traded companies’ average stock price performance of the sector), and eventually, from the empirical comparison, no statistical evidence was found to support the hypothesis that the stock performance of the quality award winners is superior to the average rate of return on the stock market.

Asthmatic patients with fixed airway obstruction (FAO) and patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) share similarities in terms of irreversible pulmonary function impairment. Exhaled nitric oxide (eNO) has been documented as a marker of airway inflammation in asthma, but not in COPD. To examine whether the basal eNO level and the change after exercise may differentiate asthmatics with FAO from COPD, 27 normal subjects, 60 stable asthmatics, and 62 stable COPD patients were studied. Asthmatics with FAO (n = 29) were defined as showing a postbronchodilator FEV1/forced vital capacity (FVC) ≤70% and FEV1 less than 80% predicted after inhaled salbutamol (400 μg). COPD with dynamic hyperinflation (n = 31) was defined as a decrease in inspiratory capacity (ΔIC%) after a 6 minute walk test (6MWT). Basal levels of eNO were significantly higher in asthmatics and COPD patients compared to normal subjects. The changes in eNO after 6MWT were negatively correlated with the percent change in IC (r = −0.380, n = 29, P = 0.042) in asthmatics with FAO. Their levels of basal eNO correlated with the maximum mid-expiratory flow (MMEF % predicted) before and after 6MWT. In COPD patients with air-trapping, the percent change of eNO was positively correlated to ΔIC% (rs = 0.404, n = 31, P = 0.024). We conclude that asthma with FAO may represent residual inflammation in the airways, while dynamic hyperinflation in COPD may retain NO in the distal airspace. eNO changes after 6MWT may differentiate the subgroups of asthma or COPD patients and will help toward delivery of individualized therapy for airflow obstruction.