Chinese parent firm’s knowledge types and governance modes’ effect on overseas subsidiaries’ performance: a contingency perspective

Purpose Based on an ensemble sample of multinational enterprises (MNEs), this study aims to explore the effect of the interactions between Chinese parent firms’ knowledge (including both technological and marketing knowledge), equity control and cultural distance on the business performance of their overseas branches under different subsidiary roles. Design/methodology/approach The study uses a data set compiled from 138 listed Chinese manufacturing enterprises and their 231 overseas subsidiaries to test the hypotheses regarding the interactive effects of transferred knowledge types and the subsidiary’s control mode. Findings The empirical results suggest that the moderating effects of equity control and cultural distance vary with the types of the parent firm’s knowledge and subsidiary roles. Specifically, equity control positively regulates the relationship between technological knowledge and subsidiary performance while negatively moderating the relationship between marketing knowledge and subsidiary performance. Cultural distance appears to negatively regulate the relationship between marketing knowledge and subsidiary performance. This binary relationship is shown to be more significant for the implementer subsidiaries. Originality/value Drawing on the literature on inter-firm governance and knowledge-induced innovation mechanisms, the authors develop a theoretical contingency framework to derive some managerial implications for inter-firm and infra-firm knowledge transfer in light of MNEs’ performance integrity.

The Continuum of Support for Building Intimacy Knowledge in College for Students With Intellectual Disability

Postsecondary education (PSE) programs allow for college students with intellectual disability to experience a higher level of autonomy in choice making, which they may not have experienced in their family home or high school. This includes choice making related to romantic and sexual relationships. The Continuum of Support for Intimacy Knowledge in College Survey (CoSIK-C) was used to examine how PSE programs support college students in building their intimacy knowledge. Types of resources and services used to build intimacy knowledge and the frequency and context in which support was provided were identified and varied across programs. Implications for practice and future research are provided.

Knowledge transfer supporting sustainable development: implications for regional intermediaries

The wicked sustainability challenges of current socio-technical systems, crossing the planetary boundaries vital for human life, call for fundamental and radical change in the form of transitions. These sustainability transitions require a knowledge basis of relevant actors in the system, which intermediary structures organizing knowledge transfer can support. Over the last decades, sustainability researchers have not only increasingly studied the dynamics of transitions (Rip and Kemp 1998; Geels 2002; Papachristos et al. 2013), but have also gained insights on activities contributing to the acceleration of transitions and the sup-portive role of intermediaries in that regard (Wieczorek and Hekkert 2012; Kanda et al. 2018; Kivimaa et al. 2019). This paper revisits the literature on the dynamics of transitions, the activities of intermediaries in contributing in order to formulate implications of the characteristics of sustainable development and sustainability transitions and the related knowledge types for the organization of knowledge transfer by regional intermediaries.

The Effects of Knowledge Types on Consumer Decision Making for Non-Toxic Housing Materials and Products

This study explored how different types of consumer knowledge (exposure, subjective knowledge, and objective knowledge) predict perceptions (benefits, severity, and barriers) and behavioral intention to choose non-toxic housing materials and products based on the extended health belief model (HBM). The target population was people 18 years or older living in the U.S. A total of 1050 valid responses were collected through an online survey. Structural equation modeling was used to test the model via AMOS version 24. Results show that the prediction of exposure, subjective knowledge, and objective knowledge for behavioral intention is mediated by health belief perceptions in different ways. Exposure had a significant impact on perceived benefits and perceived severity but not on perceived barriers. Subjective knowledge was not significantly associated with perceptions, but all of the effects of objective knowledge on the HBM elements were significant. Significant indirect effects of exposure and subjective knowledge on behavioral intention were found; the indirect effects of objective knowledge on behavioral intention were insignificant. By adopting the extended HBM, this study contributes to a better understanding of the link among knowledge types and perceptions of non-toxic housing materials and products, and behavioral intention to choose them.

Preservice Teachers’ Content Knowledge and Learning Obstacles in Shape and Space

The notion of shape and space is the building block for geometry reasoning. Accordingly, it is expected that those trained to teach would possess substantial content knowledge for teaching planar and spatial notions. This study investigated the level of content knowledge and sources of learning obstacles encountered by preservice teachers prior to their first practice teaching of shape and space. The study adopted a cross-sectional survey design involving 757 second-year preservice teachers from 12 colleges of education in Ghana. Data were collected through written responses to basic shape and space tasks. Quantitative data were analyzed descriptively while qualitative data were analyzed thematically into matrix index. Participants’ content knowledge were categorized into declarative, conditional and procedural knowledge types. The result shows that participants were largely operating at moderate levels of declarative, procedural and conditional content knowledge. However, participants demonstrated higher procedural knowledge than declarative and conditional knowledge. Tasks on prisms and pyramids were more difficult for preservice teachers than those on angles, triangles and quadrilaterals. The learning obstacles encountered were mostly didactical followed by epistemological with few being ontogenetic. The study recommends that tutors should employ investigative didactic strategies to promote the three content knowledge types identified and to address the epistemological and ontogenetic obstacles in preservice teachers’ learning of shape and space.

Knowledge types and presuppositions

Public apologies are so prevalent in our social lives that they have become a subject of scholarly investigation all over the globe. The present study, which involves coding, frequency counting, and qualitative analysis, examines the strategic aspects of 16 public apologies issued to Filipino apologizees. The results of our analysis indicate that apologizers often choose varied knowledge types and draw upon presuppositions to strategically omit details that can negatively influence their credibility and the reception of their apology. More specifically, apologizers use the audience’s presuppositions to avoid presenting common knowledge of the offense that may incriminate them further; they also omit the mention of future action that may hold them more accountable for their transgressions. Our present analysis bolsters the view that although the sincerity of public apologies cannot be exactly measured, they are still performed as part of image repair and management of interpersonal relationships.

Sequential consumer choice as multi-cued retrieval

Fulfilling goals in open-ended tasks like grocery shopping requires sequential navigation of countless options. When deciding what to choose next, we propose that past choices cue retrieval of subsequent options from memory. Moreover, each past choice may function as a cue to multiple knowledge sources, such as episodic, semantic, and hierarchical relationships involving the item. We evaluate this account of open-ended sequential choice on the purchase sequences of over 100,000 online grocery shoppers. Consistent with our account, we find that consumer choices are predicted by their similarity with their previous choice, suggesting that past choices cue retrieval of subsequent options. Products that co-occurred in the same episode, were nearby in semantic space, or neighbours in a semantic hierarchy were most likely to be chosen, suggesting that consumers queried multiple types of long-term knowledge. We evaluated a wide array of formal models and found that the one that best accounted for people's choices included retrieval cues for all three knowledge types. Models fits to individuals allowed us to assess how much they relied upon each knowledge type. The type of knowledge that people most relied upon determined the type of errors they made; more episodic retrievals predicted fewer forgotten items and more semantic retrievals predicted more items being added to one's basket that they didn't otherwise need. Our results demonstrate how basic retrieval mechanisms shape sequential choices in real-world, goal-directed tasks.

From participatory engagement to co-production: Modelling climate-sensitive processes in the Arctic

Participation is increasingly being used in the modelling of climate-sensitive systems to improve usability. Bottom-up, place-based approaches to modelling can challenge the dominantly positivist approaches used until recently. We examined how participation is reported within modelling research that uses participatory approaches, focusing on the Arctic. Our systematic scoping review identified 26 articles that used participatory approaches in modelling research to explore a climate-sensitive process in an Arctic setting and analysed the degree of participation at each stage of the process for each article. A diversity of topics, modelling approaches, and participant groups were identified. Most studies (71%) occurred in the North American Arctic, and all studies engaged with non-Western knowledge types to some degree. Participation was most commonly reported at the model generation and participant identification stages, and least commonly reported in the choice of modelling type. Participatory scores—based upon the number and degree of participatory stages of a study—were higher where authors gave instrumental or transformative rationales for the use of participation, and among studies which described prioritising non-Western knowledge types. Detailed reporting of participatory processes was frequently absent, suggesting a need for clearer discussions of these issues in the descriptions of the process.