Yingying Zhang

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly integrated into corporate strategies and operations, attracting considerable scholarly and practical attention, as well as raising important questions about its implications for firms’ sustainable development. The emerging body of literature has largely focused on the association between AI adoption and firm profitability, overlooking its implications for sustainable corporate governance. To address this gap in the literature, this study develops a novel AI adoption index to examine whether the adoption of AI is associated with stronger environmental, social, and governance (ESG) engagement among Japanese firms. Based on Stakeholder Theory and the Resource-Based View, we find for our sample of 145 Japanese firms that a higher AI adoption rate positively correlates with a higher overall ESG engagement. Specifically, our findings indicate that, after robustness checks, AI adoption is associated with social engagement scores, but not with environmental or governance engagement scores.

Emerging markets (EMs) are rising

Purpose: The rapidly changing international business landscape, driven by dynamic factors such as technology, emerging markets, and unpredictable crises, demands that organizations innovate to survive while gaining and sustaining competitive advantages. Culture, an intricate multilevel construct, presents challenges for transnational enterprises and international business as a key “soft” element of organizational strategy.Design/methodology/approach: This paper employs a triangulated method combining a systematic literature search, machine learning, and qualitative thematic content analysis to explore the relationship between culture and innovation within the context of international business. The analysis involved scrutinizing 697 journal articles indexed in the Web of Science database.Findings: Using k-means, which is an unsupervised machine-learning tool in Python, and hypertext preprocessor language scripting, we identified seven topic clusters and 94 keywords. Qualitative thematic content analysis facilitated the recognition of prevailing patterns in researchers' conceptualizations of the interplay between innovation and culture. We identified influential relationships between cultural configurations and innovation.Research limitations/implications: Our analysis contributes to developing a comprehensive research field map encompassing international business, innovation, and culture.Originality/value: This study significantly enhances our knowledge of culture and international innovation. Future research that recognizes culture as a dynamic configuration at multiple levels (e.g. national, organizational, professional, and individual) and employs more comprehensive measures of innovation and culture could substantially advance our understanding of the intersection of culture and innovation in international business.

This paper examines the strategic management of people within enterprises as a driver of sustainable growth. As strategic people management (SPM) is founded on the Eastern knowledge workers’ perspective, we integrate SPM with the Confucian perspective to analyze the factors underlying the sustainable success of Chinese management. In so doing, we review the literature on sustainability, SPM, Chinese management, and the integration of Confucian cultural values. We utilize the qualitative case research method to examine 20 successful Chinese enterprises across five sectors. The results of the case analysis reveal three types of sustainable SPM associated with Confucian values: responsible people management, paradoxical people management, and humanistic people management. We propose a conception of sustainable SPM combined with Confucianism to be relevant in the Chinese business context, where a high degree of dynamism can be seen. The findings of this study could be extended through analyses conducted in other contexts with a high level of complexity, such as emerging markets, disruptive technology, unexpected crises, or any aggregated interactions of such contexts.

Purpose: The paper aims to explore how market pressures, upper echelons theory and slack resources interact to affect pro-environmental strategies in an emerging market. Specifically, the authors assess external market factors (consumer concerns, regulatory forces and competitors' concerns) in terms of how they are negotiated through internal resources and company capabilities (top management commitment and discretionary slack) to produce or not produce pro-environmental strategies (environmental corporate strategy and environmental marketing strategy).Design/methodology/approach: A total of 1,000 questionnaires were distributed in the Pakistani manufacturing sector – where energy use and natural resources consumption is intensive. The final 181 useable responses were analyzed using covariance-based structural equation modeling and the PROCESS macro.Findings: The results reveal that regulatory forces and competitors' concerns have both direct and conditional indirect effects on environmental corporate strategy but only conditional indirect effects on environmental marketing strategies through the mediation of top management commitment and at different levels of discretionary slack. However, consumer concerns remain inconsequential antecedents with insignificant direct effects and conditional indirect effects on environmental corporate and marketing strategies through the mediation of top management commitment at different levels of discretionary slack.Originality/value: The authors propose an integrative model as a functioning mechanism for the environmental strategic decisions of companies in emerging markets. This model relies on both slack resource and upper echelons theories. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the impacts of internal and external determinants and functions on environmental strategies at corporate and functional levels in emerging markets. The various paths to diverse levels of environmental strategy and the insignificant role of consumer concerns suggest a need for further investigation of corporate environmentalism in emerging markets that consider their distinctive legal, societal, market and institutional contexts.

Background: There has been growing evidence of small-airway dysfunction in patients with asthma. Few studies have evaluated the mechanism of small-airway dysfunction in mouse models of asthma. Purpose: We explored the correlation between small-airway spirometric variables and large-airway function or inflammation in different endotypes of asthma. Methods: Ovalbumin (OVA) sensitization/challenge was used to produce a type 2 (T2)-high asthma model, and OVA combined with ozone exposure (OVA + ozone) was used for the T2-low asthma model with increased neutrophils. Spirometry, airway responsiveness, cytokine levels in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF), and pathological analyses of lung slices stained with hematoxylin-eosin, periodic acid–Schiff, and Masson’s trichrome stain were all determined. Muc5ac expression in lung tissue was evaluated by the reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), and alpha-smooth muscle actin was measured by immunohistochemistry. Results: Inflammatory cells infiltrated the lung tissue and inflammatory cytokines were increased in the BALF of both the OVA and OVA + ozone groups, compared with the control group. Peribronchial hypersecretion and collagen deposition were evident in the models. The OVA + ozone group showed greater neutrophilic infiltration and peribronchial smooth muscle proliferation than the OVA group. Large-airway obstruction, small-airway dysfunction, and airway hyperresponsiveness were confirmed in both models. Small-airway functional variables, such as MMEF (mean midexpiratory flow, average flow from 25 to 75% forced vital capacity [FVC]) and FEF50 (forced expiratory flow at 50% of FVC), were positively correlated with large-airway function and had a stronger negative correlation with airway inflammation, mucus secretion, and responsiveness than large-airway function. Conclusion: Small-airway dysfunction was evident in the two endotypes of asthma and was correlated with severe airway inflammation, mucus hypersecretion, and airway hyperresponsiveness. The small airways may be an important target in asthma treatment, and further research in the role of small-airway variables in the pathogenesis of asthma is warranted.

The employment of college students has been a serious social problem in recent years, and it is also the focus of concern of tens of millions of families and countries. The long-term employment policy of our country has been dominated by market distribution to give full play to the role of government macro-control. Past studies have also focused on macro-system, middle-family and micro-individual aspects, but there are few studies on the community with public characteristics between the state and individuals. In June 2020, the notice on guiding and encouraging college graduates to urban and rural community employment entrepreneurship provides us with new ideas to think about college students' employment entrepreneurship from a community perspective. The public nature of the community determines that the community has a natural advantage in solving public affairs. This paper will start with this characteristic of the community and study the mechanism of promoting the employment and entrepreneurship of college students. This paper provides a new idea for the research of college students' employment entrepreneurship.

This paper explores the most recent Fintech (financial technology) phenomenon from an ecosystem perspective. Differentiated from the earlier Fintech evolution led by traditional financial institutions, “cross-sector” Fintech that operates at the intersection of financial services and information technology disrupts existing business models of banks while creating novel ecosystem dynamics. This study explores the Fintech ecosystem composition to understand better business model innovation based on underlying ecosystem dynamics while focusing on the specific role of cross-sector actors. These actors have escaped scrutiny despite being mature and experienced and having strong resource bases. Adopting a comparative case study method by considering the China-based Alibaba Group and Tencent, the study’s findings indicate that novel business model developments based on strong technological expertise and scale-based resources by cross-sector Fintech render a functional perspective on fast-developing Fintech industry less practical. Apart from cross-sector Fintech, investors constitute a new dimension in the conceptualization of the Fintech ecosystem. Overall, the interconnectedness of the cross-sector Fintech beyond the Fintech sectors drives the fuzzy boundaries between ecosystems, established business models, terminology definitions, ecosystem actors’ roles and relationships, which appear to become more heterogeneous and changeable over time. The study contributes to the scant literature on Fintech ecosystems and their sustainable development.