ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING AND VENDOR SUPPORT QUALITY BY THE USAGE OF APPLICATION SOFTWARE PACKAGES： A STUDY OF ASIAN ENTREPRENEURS

In this paper we study how organizational learning impacts organizational behavior, and howvendor support quality enhances product adoption and usage behavior.These constructs were verifiedusing Application Software Packages(ASP)-a prewritten, precoded, commercially available set ofprograms that eliminates the need for individuals or organizations to write their own softwareprograms for certain functions. The relationship between ASP usage, usage outcomes and useprocesses were also investigated. Two hundred and ninety-five Chinese, Indian, and Malayentrepreneurships were studied. It was found that usage outcome strongly determines usage, while useprocess has only an indirect relationship (via outcome) on usage. The impact of organizational learningand vendor service quality on usage, usage outcome, and use process were robust. Theoretical andpractical implications of the research are discussed.     

Technical Notes ：STUDIES ON THE VALUE OF SECONDARY MARKET TO THE SUPPLY CHAIN

This paper investigates the impact of a secondary market, where retailers can buy and sell excessinventories, on the supply chain. We develop a two-period model with a single manufacturer and tworetailers. At the beginning of the first period the retailers order and receive products from themanufacturer, but at the beginning of the second period, they can trade surplus products betweenthemselves in the secondary market. We investigate the impact of the correlated dependence ofretailers' demand on both the quantity effect and the allocation effect under the secondary market.Lastly,we study potential strategies for the manufacturer to increase sales with the existence of thesecondary market.     

LOGISTICS SCHEDULING： ANALYSIS OFTWO-STAGE PROBLEMS

This paper studies the coordination effects between stages for scheduling problems where decision-making is a two-stage process. Two stages are considered as one system. The system can be a supply chain that links two stages, one stage representing a manufacturer; and the other, a distributor It also can represent a single manufacturer, while each stage represents a different department responsible for a part of operations. A problem that jointly considers both stages in order to achieve ideal overall system performance is defined as a system problem. In practice, at times, it might not be feasible for the two stages to make coordinated decisions due to (i) the lack of channels that allow decision makers at the two stages to cooperate, and/or (ii) the optimal solution to the system problem is too difficult (or costly) to achieve.Two practical approaches are applied to solve a variant of two-stage logistic scheduling problems. The Forward Approach is defined as a solution procedure by which the first sta     

经济全球化对当代文化的复杂影响

经济全球化不仅是世界经济发展的新格局，同时也带动了世界文化的发展。西方强势经济冲击的背后带来了生产文化、消费文化的影响。文化的发展既受世界经济发展的推动或影响，也是不同民族文化的互动过程，文化的发展是多种力的相互作用，而不是文化的趋同。     

Systemic Design for Applying the Combined Use of SSM and CDA to Social Practices

In this paper, we propose a framework for applying the combined use of soft systems methodology (SSM) and critical discourse analysis (CDA) based on social semiotic systemic functional linguistics to social practices. In the social practice, ‘participation’ mode of Checkland’s SSM is used for ‘problem-solving’ whilst CDA is used to problematize ‘problem-solving’ processes within the practice. During the meta-process of problematization of our research, we used Churchman’s systems approach and its theory of ‘boundary critique’ in order to explore issues such as governance, inequality of power, and social values within the organization examined for this study. In other words, the process-oriented methodology proposed in this paper consists of two processes: that of ‘problem-solving’ based on SSM and of problematization of naturalized discourse from the perspective of CDA and two phases of boundary critique in social practice. A detailed account of a case study of Korean social enterprise is given to demonstrate how our proposed framework of the combined use of SSM and CDA is applied into practice. Reflecting the outcome of the case study, this paper argues that critical social research from systemic inquiry using what we call ‘process-oriented methodology’ is useful to address some of the social and complex issues related to understanding dynamic relation between power and discourse amongst participants in the social enterprise in Korean contexts.     

Emergence: A Systems Theory’s Challenge to Ethics

The paper reconstructs Niklas Luhmann’s diagnosis of the dysfunctional character of moral communication in the modern society by emphasizing the emergent character of today’s moral problems. In the systems-theoretic literature, emergence means the irreducibility of the properties of the whole to the characteristics of its parts. Two arguments have been advanced. First, the dysfunctional character of moral communication has been traced back to the emergent character of many moral problems. Moral communication has thus been shown to be not inherently dysfunctional, but rather needful of semantic forms that take account of the emergent properties of the economic and other social systems. Second, these properties highlight the moral aspect of the precariousness of system–environment relations as seen by Luhmann. As a moral problem, this precariousness can be resolved through greater sensitivity of social systems to their environment, social and natural alike. Accordingly, the emergent properties of the economic and other social systems can be captured by recasting the concept of responsibility as the individual-level or organizational-level projection of the environmental sensitivity of these systems.     

Orthogonal Arrays Robust to a Specified Set of Nonnegligible Effects

This paper considers experimental situations where the interested effects have to be orthogonal to a set of nonnegligible effects.It is shown that various types of orthogonal arrays with mixed strength are A-optimal for estimating the parameters in ANOVA high dimension model representation.Both cases including interactions or not are considered in the model.In particularly,the estimations of all main effects are A-optimal in a mixed strength(2,2)_3 orthogonal array and the estimations of all main effects and two-factor interactions in G_1×G_2 are A-optimal in a mixed strength(2,2)_4 orthogonal array.The properties are also illustrated through a simulation study.     

Batching Scheduling in a Two-Level Supply Chain with Earliness and Tardiness Penalties

This paper studies the batch sizing scheduling problem with earliness and tardiness penalties which is closely related to a two-level supply chain problem. In the problem, there are K customer orders, where each customer order consisting of some unit length jobs has a due date. The jobs are processed in a common machine and then delivered to their customers in batches, where the size of each batch has upper and lower bounds and each batch may incur a fixed setup cost which can also be considered a fixed delivery cost. The goal is to find a schedule which minimizes the sum of the earliness and tardiness costs and the setup costs incurred by creating a new batch. The authors first present some structural properties of the optimal schedules for single-order problem with an additional assumption (a): The jobs are consecutively processed from time zero. Based on these properties, the authors give a polynomial-time algorithm for single-order problem with Assumption (a). Then the authors give dynamic programming algorithms for some special cases of multiple-order problem with Assumption (a). At last, the authors present some structural properties of the optimal schedules for single-order problem without Assumption (a) and give a polynomial-time algorithm for it.     

An empirical investigation on the risk-return relationship of carbon future market

This paper examines the risk-return relationship for the carbon future market during Phases I, II and III of the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS). The risk factors derived from the newly developed LSW model, are embedded into a GARCH framework. This new specification is compared with several GARCH-M type models analyzing the risk-return relationship in the carbon market. The results show that the new specification consistently achieves a good fit and possesses superior explanatory power for the European Union Allowance (EUA) data. Some policy suggestions regarding market efficiency are also provided.     

The complexity and on-line algorithm for automated storage and retrieval system with stacker cranes on one rail

This paper considers an on-line scheduling and routing problem concerning the automated storage and retrieval system from tobacco industry. In this problem, stacker cranes run on one common rail between two racks. Multiple input/output-points are located at the bottom of the racks. The stacker cranes transport bins between the input/output-points and cells on the racks to complete requests generated over time. Each request should be accomplished within its response time. The objective is to minimize the time by which all the generated requests are completed. Under a given physical layout, the authors study the complexity of the problem and design on-line algorithms for both one-stacker-crane model and two-stacker-crane model. The algorithms are validated by instances and numerical simulations.